Ignited
by Mariel Nightstalker
Summary: Harry Potter stumbles across an unexpected source of magic that sends him careening onto a foreign planet. CROSSOVER SLASH Harry/Sephiroth
1. Chapter 1

A/N: This will be a few chapters long, detailing Harry's foray into a foreign planet. And maybe, just maybe, he'll find love on the way.

**Ignited**

Few people ever experience total alienation, the experience of being flung into a metaphorical ocean without even knowing what water is.

Harry was the kind of man that experienced rare things, so of course he had been through the above situation. It happened quite by accident, as many of his experiences did. He was at the 10th birthday party of Ron and Hermione's eldest, Rose. She was a funny kid, always making droll comments that made her sound twice her age.

Harry hadn't known what to buy her, as she wasn't the kind of girl that liked toys or clothes and she actually had a policy about not purchasing books when they lived right across the street from a perfectly good library. So he took a day off from work (a joke of a desk job at some Muggle financial firm that paid for shit but gave him two months paid vacation every year) to wander the entirety of London in search of a gift for the girl who disliked gifts.

He couldn't even buy her sweets, because she disapproved of them and fed them all to Hugo.

There were a number of shops that sold hodge-podge trinkets and little scarves and other nonsense. He visited about twenty of these before stumbling across one wedged between twin rivaling bakeries. It was on the shabby side, and someone had spray-painted phallic graffiti all over the door. He wouldn't have gone inside at all if the door hadn't opened just as he was passing by. Something that smelt delicious wafted through the door behind the young boy that exited, clutching an old board game to his chest.

Shrugging, he took the steps up to the door and then eased inside. It was a very narrow door, meant for people less well-fed by Mrs. Weasley.

He made it inside, not that there was much of a difference in narrowness. There were shelves on the walls and tables jutting forward in front of them. The gap between them was just barely wide enough for him to sidle through sideways. He eyed the merchandise as he wriggled through. It was dim here, lit only by the thin sunlight from the grimy front windows and some flickering light bulbs screwed directly into the copper ceiling.

There were some old photographs, tied together with lace, that he considered thoughtfully before a cursory flip-through revealed a woman with two heads and a boy with his stomach so distended with retained urine that he looked like he'd swallowed a globe. Rose would love them, but Hermione wouldn't be pleased.

He didn't know how much time he spent looking at cracked snow globes with Paris cityscapes inside, or bits of amber containing insects, or globes with extra countries. But finally his elbow brushed against a stack of magazines and they slid to one side with a whisper-crackle of old paper, revealing a box. At first it looked like just a jewelry box, simple enough, but as Harry squinted at it he began to see dozens of little lines and indents. Curious now, he picked it up and moved to hold it under one of the light bulbs. It was a puzzle box, painted with tiny squares that confused the eye and concealed or revealed the pressure pieces. He smiled. Rose _loved _puzzles.

Calling and then shouting for the proprietor eventually dragged the woman from the back room. She was middle-aged and the remnants of what must have been a beautiful face were painted garishly in colors of red, yellow, and purple. She smiled at him when he told her who the box was for.

"I'm sure she'll love it. Kids these days need something more stimulating than those damn video games."

He nodded, personally disliking their violence or pointlessness. He had enough of both of those things in his life, though the random requests for his presence on Auror missions had been steadily decreasing the past two years.

Walking home, he frowned as he thought about that. He was pretty sure it wasn't because they thought he was losing his touch. The mission before last he'd broken one of the department's records, a record he had set when he was twenty years old. He nodded to his neighbor, Miss Bonnie Badlook, and unlocked his front door.

Inside, he puttered around doing some simple chores before settling down in his study to relax for the night. He could see the bag containing the puzzle in the corner of his eye.

Compelled by something, he took it out and turned it over and over in his hands. He pushed on one of the rectangles and it disappeared into the center. Two pieces popped out, one on the back and one on top.

He pushed them back in, and the original piece he'd pressed popped back into position. He tinkered with a little longer, always careful to return it to its original shape. Rose was going to love it.

Rose did indeed love it, and fiddled with it for the rest of the party as she talked to her relatives and joked with her friends, most of whom were just as fascinated as she was. Except for Ruben, of course, but Ruben thought everything was stupid so he didn't count.

Harry visited Ron and Hermione about three times a week, sometimes more, sometimes less. They didn't visit him. His house was small and crammed full of work stuff and his collection of jade curiosities. It was Neville's fault, the jade. He let slip one lunch date that he was working with Luna on the history of jade as a channel for magic. It'd been used for wands in Asia for thousands of years, apparently, before the secrets to preparing the jade had been lost in some battle or other. From the stories, which could be exaggerated but perhaps were not, jade was far superior to wood as a channel for magic.

Ever since then, Harry couldn't stay away from the stone. He found that his little spurts of accidental magic, which built up throughout the day at his Muggle job, sparked and danced amongst the jade. Once one of the pieces, a yellowed statuette of a young girl with a basket of flowers, glowed from inside for a brilliant moment before exploding in a shower of real flowers.

Every time he visited, he asked Rose how the puzzle was going. Every time she would shrug and say that she hadn't solved it yet, but showed him her progress. The inner pieces of the puzzle had some sort of color code, and bits of stone and gems were embedded very deep inside. Harry wondered if the junk shop lady knew what she sold him.

As she made progress, anticipation about what was in the central compartment, as they now knew there was a storage area in the center, built to a fever pitch.

And then one day she solved it. Harry was arguing with Ron about whether or not kilts were emasculating in modern culture when it happened. There was a pop, then a sliding sound as she pushed the last piece home, and finally a chirp like a sparrow in springtime. They went silent and turned to look at Rose.

With the puzzle cupped in her palms, she stared down in wonder at something only she could see. They crowded around her and saw that the central compartment contained a round stone. It was perfectly spherical, and a bright green color that Harry recognized as jade.

"Whoa…" Ron breathed, making his daughter giggle.

A pattern of veins done in gold and some black metal Harry couldn't identify wrapped the sphere, making it look almost like an egg. Rose took it out, weighing it in her small hand. With her fingers closed tight, slivers of green peeped from between her fingers.

"It's really heavy."

She handed it to her father, and he weighed it as well. It felt heavier than it should have. He passed it to Harry.

Just before his fingers closed around it, Harry had a moment of doubt. A spark caught when his fingertip was a hair away from its surface. His eyes widened, and his lips parted to say something, anything…

It was dropped into his expectant hand and he howled as it lit up brightly from inside. A small sun had been hatched inside somehow. Harry felt numb suddenly, and light-headed. He swayed in place; eyes squeezed shut against the light. Ron was saying something, prying at his fingers. The jade seemed to pulse like a living thing in his hand.

Something went whoosh, and Harry's knees buckled. Before they could slam into the carpet, he vanished in a flash of still-brighter light.

~000~

End chapter 1


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Harry was immediately alert, every muscle he knew how to use tensed for an attack. He should have known better than to just grab a piece of jade, especially when he knew damn well what it had the potential to do. Nothing came to grab him, so he paid more attention to his surroundings. The jade was nowhere to be found.

He was in an alley, and a dirty one at that. Frowning, he looked at the garbage dumpster, at the puddles of iridescent oil, and then up at what he expected to be a sky full of clouds. There was no sky, only a giant mechanical contraption. It appeared to be made up mostly of pipes, whose clear windows revealed green liquid being pumped through them at a dizzying velocity.

He watched the liquid slosh through the pipes, gurgling and rumbling, until his neck started to hurt. He craned it in a new direction and saw the same thing. Turning full circle, rising up onto his toes and leaning back in his heels, all he could see was this bizarre roof-like machine.

"Huh," he huffed, putting his thumbnail between his lips.

It was starting to look as though he wasn't in Kansas anymore. He went to the mouth of the alley and peeped out. He was in the slums of some city; that much was obvious. The actual buildings were decrepit and caving in, and cities of shanties made from cardboard and pieces of trash leaned against them as though huddled for warmth.

Not that it was cold down here. In fact, it was uncomfortably warm. It was hot and dark and moist, like a womb. He looked for any sign of life.

An old woman hobbled around the corner, pushing a cart selling what smelt like roasted onions and potatoes. His stomach rumbled but he ignored it. There was no way he had any of their currency. At least she'd been dressed in a raggedy blue day dress. That meant that, chances were, he didn't look really weird in his jeans and sweater, both of which were gray. They acted as a sort of camouflage, because several more people came and went and none of them even noticed him standing there watching.

He was disappointed that none of them spoke to each other. He needed to know what language they spoke. Thankfully he had his wand, so he could cast some gathering spells as soon as he overheard a conversation and then convert it into a translation.

It wasn't for another few hours, during which he repeatedly lost his nerve to relocate, that someone said something.

The old woman from before wheeled by again, and an equally ancient man came hobbling out of one of the shelters. He paid her in a combination of paper and small coins, and then proceeded to speak to her in perfect gibberish. Harry could recognize most languages thanks to the Minister being absolutely _insane _after the War and somehow convinced Harry to go on a world tour. But this? This wasn't anything he'd ever heard. He aimed his wand at them and cast.

Nothing happened.

With a groan of mounting depression, he disappeared back into the alley to swish and flick vainly, hoping for anything. Even a spark would do. At least then he could set someone on fire in self-defense.

But no, that was too much to ask. There wasn't a peep or a wink from his wand. Sitting on his haunches so he wouldn't get oil on his arse, he put his face in his hands and allowed himself to feel hopeless for a few minutes.

When he had that out of his system, he stood and began looking around him with a more critical eye. As time progressed, little lights began to turn on. Most of them were advertisements, but some lit soft glows from inside the shanties. He was able to pinpoint that they were all occupied by someone, which meant no squatting in some unsuspecting person's home.

There was nothing for it. He was going to have to explore. Now, Harry wasn't a coward by any means, but he'd had enough hair-turning experiences on his world tour to make him develop something of a phobia about traveling anywhere the people slept in houses made of cardboard.

The street outside his alley wasn't much wider because of the shanties. The locals gave him curious looks, and he became sure that the burly man in a cut-off shirt with more tattoos than skin was following him. He tried to walk with a sense of purpose to throw him off instead of meandering like a timid sheep, but he couldn't help it. He had no idea where he was going, and it was definitely showing.

More men began to follow him, stealthily. There was even a woman or two in there, the tough kind with hair dyed so often you didn't know what color to call it.

He walked faster, aiming for a large cluster of lights in the distance.

One of the guys yelled something in his language.

He began to run. He was good at running. He was almost better at running than he was at fighting, but his wand wasn't working right now so running was the best option he had. He dodged around young couples and overturned displays of tourist trinkets in his wake, anything to slow his pursuers. And then he saw a clothing store, passed it, and crept back to it using the alleys. He passed a man pushing a needle into his arm, obviously a drug of some kind.

The clothing store had a back room full of boxes of stock they hadn't displayed yet. He rifled through them until he found something closer to his size. The trousers were black, and the sweatshirt was some indeterminable shade of purple-rust-gray. It was too big, but that suited him fine. He would have to steal food too, and the sizeable pockets would only help him.

He kept his favorite pair of combat boots, happy that he was wearing them and not his trainers, and the knife he always carried for emergencies. His wand he strapped to his calf, not knowing quite what to do with it.

Harry slipped out the back and straight into the chest of the first guy who'd been following him. He had a gun and a grin that said he was looking forward to using it. Harry reacted without thinking and jammed his knife straight into his heart. He wobbled, toppled over. Harry knelt and cut his throat.

Killing without magic always made him feel a little nauseous. The wand gave him some distance, and was always cleaner. But actually feeling the blood of another person on his hands and face was not something he ever really got used to. He swallowed his bile and stumbled back into the clothing store, where he'd spotted a staff toilet.

Locking the door behind him, he scrubbed all traces of the man's blood off of him. When he was clean and dry and feeling human again, he exited calmly through the front door. Across the street was one of the tough girls, but she didn't look twice at him with his hood up.

He walked up and down the street, looking in the shops and trying to familiarize himself with what their symbols meant. He figured out the one for clothes, and food, and bathroom. They didn't segregate toilets here, something he found mildly interesting and helpful.

The food he stole from a passing cart, as most of the food seemed to be sold, was a carton of rice with fried vegetables on top. He didn't recognize any of the vegetables but crept into an alley to eat them with his fingers anyway. They were delicious, and the rice was only a little dry. He let out a happy sigh, settled into a dumpster for the night, and began to plan.

There was no way he could survive like this, just stealing food and clothes as he needed them. He didn't speak the language yet, so that was a serious impediment to getting a job. But…what if the vast majority of people here were illiterate, and jobs were given by merit of strength and skill, not communication?

If he got a job, he could save his money up by sleeping on the streets and then figure out how to travel around. There had to be jade on this planet somewhere, if this was even a separate planet and not some secret society that lived underground on Earth without anyone the wiser.

He considered this option for a while, and didn't discard it.

He fell asleep dreaming of green and yellow stones that turned bright when he touched them.

~000~

When he woke up there was a small child squatting beside his dumpster, defecating. He sighed and vowed to watch his step.

Wandering the city, watching carefully to see that he was not pursued by any of the criminals from last night, he found a man that seemed to need help moving some boxes. He gestured to him that he wanted to help, and somehow got across that he didn't speak a word of the language. The man accepted, wiping sweat from his forehead.

He helped him move things around all day, able to follow instructions as long as the man clearly demonstrated what he wanted. At the end of the day, which he figured happened when the lights came on, he was paid a handful of bills. He didn't know if he was over-paid or under-paid, but he accepted them with a smile and tried to get across that he would come back tomorrow.

There was a creature in his dumpster when he returned to it for the night. It was the size of a large dog, spiky with some kind of prickles that reminded him of a porcupine with male pattern baldness. It had a lot of teeth, so he left it alone. He didn't want to pick up some form of rabies should it bite him.

He ended up on a roof top, close to the underbelly of the metal ceiling. Even from up here he couldn't see the end of it. The city was divided into numbered pie slices. He hadn't counted, but he thought there were at least ten of them in varying stages of decrepitude. Sitting cross-legged, he surveyed the puffing, dusty city. He listened to the shouts, the screeches, and the low hum of the machine.

It smelled like a toilet everywhere, and beneath that was a sharp vinegar-like scent that he couldn't pin-point. He thought it was coming from the machine and the lights that turned on simultaneously as if they were all on the same timer. Maybe they were.

Lying on his back as he began to feel weary, he wondered what was above the plate and if he'd ever find out.

He worked for the man, moving boxes and organizing the canned food inside them in his warehouse, for several weeks. He slept on rooftops because they were warmer and he was less likely to be disturbed up there, exploring the city when he wasn't too tired at the end of the day. He wasn't used to all this manual labor and it was hard at first. But as time went by it got easier, and he was proud to see that he was developing some serious muscle tone that went beyond the light kind he'd had before from his Auror missions.

He tried not to let despair overwhelm him. Instead he learned more and more of the language, and became friendly with the other men that moved the boxes. They repeatedly asked him where he was from at first, but finally gave up. England apparently wasn't something they'd ever heard of, which reinforced his sinking doubts that this wasn't some underground facility but a different planet altogether.

Every time he thought about how he got there he felt a little dizzy at the thought. Jade was powerful enough to send someone rocketing through the universe in an instant. If only he could find some more, somewhere, somehow, there was a chance he could get home.

~000~

One day he was let off work early. There was a holiday going on of some kind, complete with parades. The decorations people put out were shabby and often home-made, but their uncustomary cheer lightened the thick air and made Harry's steps lighter. He hadn't realized how depressing the city was until he saw what they could be like.

They were celebrating the fifty-something anniversary of something that he knew was Shinra. He wasn't what Shinra was, exactly. From what he'd picked up, they made the green liquid that powered everything from cars to lamps to computers to artificial light that made the growth of plants possible in the darkness; they were also the government, the army, and the builders of this city. He wondered if they were God, if it was, indeed, a they at all. Perhaps it was an 'it'.

The stamp of Shinra was everywhere. It was the size of a thumbnail on every can of food. It was the size of a man on the side of trucks and vans that transported things to and from the trains. Harry didn't know where the trains went- he was too scared to ride them. What if he didn't know how to get back to where he was?

Left to his own devices, he sampled some of the holiday food and then climbed onto the roofs and began to explore the machine. There were ladders leading up into the metalwork set against every wall that divided each pie slice (or sector) of the city. They were marked with warning signs and some were guarded, but Harry slipped past their security with ease.

Inside the hot passages of the machine, he knew that the vinegar came from the green liquid. He watched it flow through the clear pipes, pressing his face to the hot glass. This close, he could hear something beneath the sound of it burbling. It sounded like trees in the wind and birds and singing. It didn't sound like a human voice, but rather like what the earth would sound like if it had a voice.

It was a quiet voice, but powerful enough to make him dizzied and cross-eyed.

He fell into a trance listening to it, kneeling on the ground with his ear pressed to the largest of the pipes.

A man's voice wakened him, and he was roughly grabbed by a man in black. He wore a helmet that hid his face. A gun the size of a forearm was strapped to his thigh. Harry waited for him to escort him to one of the narrower sections of the passage, close to the ladder, before he kicked the backs of his knees. The guard fell down, not expecting this from the drugged-looking foreigner. Harry sat on his back and squeezed his neck tightly until he passed out. Once sure that he was unconscious, he took his gun and searched his pockets. There was a wallet with an I.D. card and some bills. He pocketed them and tried the zippered pockets closer to his knees.

He felt something round.

It was a sphere, frighteningly similar to the one from the puzzle box. He stared at it, weighing it in his palm. It was heavy and glowed softly with yellow light in the gloomy hall.

On instinct he held it up to his ear. Faintly, very faintly, he could hear the sound of wind chimes coming from inside alongside the crackle of a fire.

He heard someone coming down the hall behind him and bolted, making sure that the gun was hidden in his sweatshirt.

In his hand he clutched the sphere tightly, unwilling to let it go. Between his fingers, pressed into his work-roughened palm, it began to spark and sputter.

~000~

End chapter 2

Well…I still have no idea where I am going with this, but I like it so far so I'll keep going. I'm not used to doing a multi-chapter with no real direction…


	3. Chapter 3

A/N: I know this is longer, but he finally meets somebody important at the end, so read the whole thing.

Chapter 3

The orb exploded in his hand just as he ducked into a small alcove to hide from the pursuing guards. He squeezed his eyes shut against the light, praying that he wouldn't lose his sight from the brightness. He felt ripped apart on an atomic level and then just as rapidly reassembled.

He was standing on grass. He hadn't seen grass for over a month, and couldn't help but fall to his knees and bury his face in it, inhaling its fresh sweet scent. Gasping in the fresh air, he gloried in the feeling of sunlight on his back. Looking up, he saw blue sky stretching as far as the eye could see.

There were country cottages in the distance, the kind shepherds and farmers lived in. he stumbled to his feet and began to walk towards them.

A bus ride later and he was back in London. He took the spare key from the chink in the bricks and unlocked his door. The smell of garbage hit his nostrils, and he frowned before realizing that his trash must have composted in his absence.

He knew he ought to notify his loved ones that he was back, but he was filthy (he'd had a grand total of one shower during his bizarre holiday) and couldn't bear to see anyone else until he was clean. He barely felt human. He walked around like someone asleep, touching his house and his possessions. It felt so strange to be home again.

He wasn't even sure how it happened.

One minute he was running, the sphere clutched tight, and the next there was nothing but light. And then… nothing; he was home just like that.

The shower felt like heaven. He lay limp on the tiled floor of his shower and just let the water soak him. He was drained somehow, sucked free of energy and even the ability to think. His head was heavy with cotton and his tongue felt funny and swollen in his mouth. It was as though all the travel fog he'd ever felt in his life coalesced into one and then came at him at once.

Hermione found him there two hours later, still enjoying the water too much to leave it. She shrieked, not recognizing him, and then crawled into the shower with him and wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling his face into her collar. She smelled like babies and lavender, and Harry put his arms around her. She was soft and warm and Hermione.

At their house, dressed in clean clothes that belonged to him, he was welcomed home by the Weasleys and Neville and Luna and even Cho, who hung about shyly these days, talking to Ginny about this and that. He still didn't know why all of his ex-girlfriends decided to be friends, but he was happy that so far Psycho Olive, his worst ex of all, had avoided them.

He couldn't explain what happened, and chose not to talk about where he'd gone. He claimed that he floated in some kind of limbo for the past three months. He was away longer than he'd thought.

He spent the night at their house, staying up late once the children were in bed drinking wine and talking about what he'd missed. His job had been given away and searches had been made before Hermione worked her lawyer magic and made them stop looking. She wasn't sure what they'd find and didn't want to risk the revelation of the magical world.

Because his experience with the jade was considered a magical anomaly, he had to go to the Ministry's Dept. of Mysteries and fill out a report. He spent the night before his appointment going over his fabricated adventure into limbo over and over again in his head, making sure that it was rock solid.

He didn't know why he didn't want to share the strange underground world with his friends, but something made him keep silent. Maybe it was because it was just his. He was the only reported case of someone being transported to another plane of existence via a piece of jade, which had been recovered from the scene and taken into the Dept. for examination.

He turned heads as he walked across the expanse of austere gray and white tiles, on his way to the Dept. His blood felt hot and excited in his veins, throbbing through his temples.

An obstinate, awkward, and slatternly girl stood behind the counter. She sneered at his attempt to dress up. He wasn't very good at it, and he knew that his shoes didn't quite match the rest of his clothes. He knew he was a bit of a fashion disappointment for the fluffier publications. What kind of hero didn't know how to match a shirt and tie?

He sighed and waited for her to fill out his application process and then sat down to sign signatures on nonsensical documents with questionable relevance and waivers that removed responsibility from the Ministry should Harry tamper with something that got him seriously altered, maimed, or killed.

The representative sent to interview him came with a team of excited researchers. The piece of jade sat on the desk between them, ominous with unfulfilled promise. Harry's eyes fixated on it. He wondered what would happen if he held it again.

It was so distracting that he almost bungled his lie. Almost; thankfully he recovered with a realistic coughing fit and re-stated his story in more solid terms. The researchers asked bizarre questions like,

"Did the air taste like pudding? If so, what kind?"

And,

"What color was your urine? Green or gray?"

He kept his cool even when his patience wore thin. He had plenty of money in the bank and certainly didn't _need _a job, but the thought of being unemployed made him feel weird. He was resolved not to let grass grow under his feet. As long as he was working somewhere, doing something, he didn't feel too restless.

The restlessness that followed the end of the Second War was responsible for ending a lot of relationships. He couldn't settle down, couldn't concentrate on anything for a long time. Ginny tried to make it work but he didn't want any of the things she wanted. Not then, and not now. He just pretended that he wanted those things now.

It took a stream of girls of increasing insanity ending in Psycho Olive to bring him to his senses. Olive set Grimmauld Place on fire to "free him from the bondage of childhood trauma" and tried to stab Ginny with a butter knife on Christmas for "breaking Harry's boyhood innocence". That wasn't why Harry left her, though. He left her because he couldn't stand the thought of seeing or touching her naked body.

That was another thing about himself he didn't understand. He distinctly remembered wanting Cho that way and Ginny as well. But after them he just sort of stopped paying attention to who he was dating. After Olive he stopped dating and just focused on his stupid job and asked for any difficult Auror missions they had lying around.

His recent life involved a complex process of avoiding negative situations and not thinking too hard about anything. He'd go crazy if he looked too closely at his lifestyle.

He finally escaped from the Dept. of Mysteries. The thought of the jade consumed his thoughts, and he felt itchy as he tried to get back into his old routine. He spent more time with Ron and Hermione and the kids while he hunted for jobs. He could have any magical job he wanted; that was why he never applied to any. What was the point? Besides, he liked the ridiculous bureaucracies of Muggle business. They were hilarious from the point of view of a wealthy semi-outsider that just happened to work there.

In hindsight he was impressed that he lasted a month before he snuck past the easy security of the Dept. of Mysteries. At first all he planned to do was look at it for a little while, and maybe figure out what the black veins were made of.

Of course it didn't end that way. He eyed the sphere from outside its protective bubble, and then reached inside. He hesitated a half-second and then stroked it with his finger. Nothing happened. He relaxed and pulled it out, rolling it from hand to hand. It was still curiously heavy, and glowed faintly in the darkness.

He raised it to his ear and craned his ears. At first there was nothing; then he heard it. The sound was so quiet that at first he thought he was imagining it. Sure enough, it came again. This wasn't like the simple chiming and crackling of the other one. This one had a big sound, a sound that made him think of long distances and speed. It began to glow in his hand, slowly but surely.

He watched it, knowing that he should put it back.

He didn't. He held on tighter as it glowed bright, brighter, brightest.

~000~

This time it was a desert he landed in. He landed hard on his side, cracking one of his ribs. He groaned and waited for the cotton-head feeling to set in. It wasn't forthcoming.

Sitting up, he stared at a sky the color of rust. The sun was faint and red through the smog and pollution. In the distance, through the wavering heat images, he could see a black dome-like shape. He started walking towards it. There was nothing else to do.

The door he entered through, dodging the guard checking for I.D. cards, led him to the familiar streets of the city. Seeing the city from the outside gave him a new perspective, and something to think about other than why the hell he came back here. Now he knew that there was something above the plate-shaped machine above his head and was determined to find out what it was.

He robbed one of the food stands without its owner noticing, feeling guilty but knowing that he needed the money to get on the train. He decided that it must be the trains that took you up.

The lady at the ticket office was impatient with his incoherence and finally showed him how many bills it cost to go 'up', the only word he had to describe what he wanted. It was more expensive than he'd thought it was going to be, but his curiosity was too strong to resist.

The train moved in a slow circuit through the pie slices before it climbed a track set into the side of the circular city. It began to climb. Harry's stomach rose higher with anticipation. He craned his head against the window, trying to see where they were going. When he wasn't doing this he spied covertly on the other passengers, which had thinned as the train made its circuit until there were only a handful of people going up. Most of them wore navy jumpsuits, some stained with oil or rust. There were a few young mothers with children, dressed marginally better than the usual denizens of the city. Their dresses had patches over the holes and their shoes still had soles.

They emerged from the darkness into the yellow-colored light of the upper level. Harry stared at the decidedly upper-middle class neighborhood they'd emerged into. It looked like a different universe, more like his than the pits below. There were trees! And grass, though both looked sickly and manufactured, as though they had come identical from a factory. There were no flowers and few pedestrians. The train stopped in a tiny station and everyone got off.

Standing on the platform, Harry could still smell the pollution but it wasn't as bad up here. And you couldn't smell the vinegar of the green fluid. Looking up, he saw the sky was full of oppressive clouds that hung low and moved greasily through the air. He chose a random direction and began walking in it.

This led him onto a little terrace looking over the edge of the city. He'd passed through the toy-like residential areas and past some little boutiques. These were populated by bored housewives and trendy-looking young people, obviously the grown offspring of the trim businesspeople that he sometimes saw having meetings in the coffee shops or riding the bus system. There didn't appear to be any private vehicles here. There were the buses and some service vehicles, but that was it.

He looked over the edge of the terrace. He could see the sloping walls of the city, cracked and sharp like the shell of an ancient sea creature. It smelled worse here on the edge than it did farther in, the garbage-sewage cocktail of the slums wafting up through the irrigation pipes that expelled their contents periodically down the walls of the city. It was rather primitive for such an obviously advanced culture.

Nose wrinkling, he turned to look over the top half of the city. His eyes fixed on a building he hadn't noticed before, though how he could have missed it was a mystery. It was the tallest point of the city by far, stretching up in a sharp spike far into the sky. The smog-like clouds covered its uppermost antennae.

It was at the center of the city and rather a long walk from the terrace, but he made it by mid-afternoon. He stopped at its base and just looked up, admiring the size and architecture. He'd gone to America on his big tour and they stopped in Chicago to see the Sear's Tower. The Sear's had been taller, but not by much.

The Shinra logo was hung from every side of it, the size of a house in triplicate.

Scoping out the security revealed surveillance and standoffish guards that only admitted businesspeople with the appropriate I.D. lanyards. He circled it looking for a service entrance of some kind. Somebody had to do the dirty work around here, and he doubted they entered the gleaming front doors like all those prim and trim employees with their laminated business cards and polished shoes.

He found a service entrance. He found several, in fact, but each one required an I.D. card slid through the device on the wall to unlock the door. He thought about just nabbing one of the lackeys and taking their card by force, but the cameras here weren't nearly as primitive as those beneath the plate. These were state of the art, government-grade cameras that could pick up the movements of a gnat.

Disappointed, he almost gave up. Then he noticed something about the building that's eluded him before. It had regularly spaced metal rails that formed a sort of decorative cage around the actual concrete building. The distance between each square was about 4 square feet. Difficult, but scalable. The trick would be how to do it without anyone noticing.

He waited until nightfall, passing the time in a small coffee shop were rebellious rich kids slouched in designer grunge clothes and talked about how their parents didn't understand them. Only one person approached him, a girl with hair dyed bubblegum pink. Her name was Rhoda, and she claimed to be a language student interested in his accent. He said he was from a small village called London, smirking at the irony.

Rhoda had a harsh voice from the constant cigarettes she puffed, and he slowly gathered that her parents weren't rich like the others riffraff gathered here. She'd saved up her money to come visit the Upper Plate, as she called it, and went to the hook-up bars to meet a rich man. He kept her in an apartment, and visited her three or four times a week. In exchange for her silence and continued charm, he paid for her tuition and half her rent. She paid for the rest by working as a bartender at night in the Upper Plate's tiny Red Light District.

Harry learned a lot from her because she took the time to slow down her words and explain what unfamiliar ones meant. He began to grasp their grammatical structure and found it distinctly Asian. He plucked up his courage to ask what the small glowing balls were that the guards carried.

She seemed surprised that he didn't know, saying that they were an international phenomenon. He let her conclude that his London was under a rock and just listened to her.

The stones were called Materia, made from Mako. Mako was the name for the green fluid, which Shinra pumped from the ground with reactors for electricity and eventually weaponry. He was surprised to find that the great Shinra was actually just a man that started a lucrative electric company. How that electric company expanded into a government with a large and unique army was unclear.

From what he knew of politics, there had to have been a lot of smoky back room deals that resulted in the gradual power shift. Shinra dominated the entire world here, and there had been a big war recently to subdue a country called Wutai that rebelled.

He absorbed all of this with wonderment, especially interested in why the Shinra SOLDIERS were so special.

Her explanation was too confusing and used a lot of words he didn't know, but he knew by the end of it that their eyes shone with light like Materia.

When the sun began to set, she took her leave to go to work. He said he was happy to meet her, and she told him that she usually spent a few hours at the café studying every day and wouldn't mind talking to him again if he was ever in the area. He didn't want to lead her on or look too interested, so he answered noncommittally.

The streets were busy now with departing businesspeople. He shouldered against the crowd, heading for the building they were exiting. Slipping around to the least-busy side of it, he began to climb. The metal was slippery and hot to the touch, but he wriggled up at a decent speed.

He didn't look down except to make sure that no one was watching him. None of the cameras were pointed at the sides of the building itself, so he was safe from the eyes of the interior security guards. The departure of the day shift workers and arrival of those who replaced them created enough confusion to distract the exterior guards.

Harry climbed as fast as he dared, thankful for his new and improved musculature.

He climbed at least 40 storeys before he found an open window. The office lavatory was empty but he could hear the whirr of a janitor's vacuum nearby. He tried to enter silently, but his foot knocked over a small potted plant he hadn't noticed on the window ledge. It crashed to the floor, smashing on the tiles. He froze, hearing the vacuum turn off.

Scrambling inside when the vacuum was not turned back on (which meant the janitor was coming to investigate), he dove into a stall and crouched on top of the toilet inside. The last person to use it hadn't flushed. He put his nose in his sleeve to escape the considerable stench.

The janitor called out a greeting twice, peeked in a stall or two, and then shrugged it off. He swept up the broken plant and put it in the trash. Just as Harry thought he was leaving, he came back to the row of stalls and reached towards his door. He held his breath.

He flung open the stall next to his, the door banging against the wall.

When he'd left Harry let out a sigh of relief. It would be horrible to have climbed so high only to be dragged out by his ear by a janitor of all people. He flushed the toilet when the vacuuming began again, confident that the sound was quiet enough not to draw attention.

He padded out of the bathroom and spied on the janitor, observing the pattern of his movements. He waited for him to duck into one of the offices set against the side of the wall on the other end of the cubicle maze (frighteningly similar to those he'd seen on Earth when first applying for a Muggle job) before dashing out. He made it to the outside hall without the janitor noticing. There was nothing there but a row of five elevators and a small door to the side of that, beyond a potted palm, marked stairs.

The elevators required I.D. cards so he tried the door to the stairs. It was unlocked.

He stepped into the gray hall and looked up. There was nothing but concrete steps as far as the eye could see. He sighed and began to climb. He wanted to go to the very top floor if he could, and look out the windows.

Ever since he was a small child he'd loved high places. Dudley was afraid of heights so a roof or tall tree was the best place to go if he couldn't outrun him. The view from the top was probably spectacular.

And even if he couldn't get all the way up there, he was still pretty high up. Maybe he would catch a glimpse of Mr. Shinra himself.

Harry snorted. He'd bet money that he was some red-faced bloated puppet of a man, a shell of the ambitious businessman he was when he built his literal empire. There was probably some reedy guy with a face like a weasel that really controlled things these days. Or maybe the President had a son; of the kind that always kill their fathers a little earlier than nature intended.

He rested every twenty flights, but kept alert in case anyone else was around. He wore corduroy slacks and a shabby button-down, the typical clothes he wore when he didn't want to wear jeans.

There was an I.D. card requirement for the top five floors. Harry was initially depressed by this, but a quick stroll through the highest floor he had admittance to revealed a staff elevator. He got in with a maid, obviously _very _pregnant but too stubborn to take time off work (she had a clenched jaw and held her chin a little higher than is usual as if challenging anyone to tell her to leave), and studiously avoided her eyes, keeping his hands in his pockets.

He punched the button for the uppermost floor. She got off two floors beneath him, her eyes lingering after she exited. He pushed the button to make the doors close faster. Dear god he hoped she didn't report a suspicious person. He would prefer to not exit the building the way he'd entered it.

The doors opened onto a spacious room outfitted completely in white. The only color was the wall-to-wall mural of the Shinra logo, in its traditional blood red shade. The room was circular, white couches regularly spaced with little tables of polished glass in front of them and tasteful groupings of plants separating each seating section. There was even a bar against one wall.

The room was deserted, and only a few lights were on.

He moved to the windows, not touching the glass in case someone saw him on the security feed and got his fingerprints. Not that he was in any of their databases, but still. Old training died hard.

The view was as wonderful as he'd been expecting. The sun was mostly set now (his climb up the stairs had taken more time than he'd hoped), but the pollution was beautiful in the dying afterlight. Green, blue, red, and purple blended together like a dying peacock spread across the sky.

He sighed, feeling sentimental and not caring.

If you asked him he wouldn't know how to explain it, but this, here, felt like home. This felt like coming back from a long trip and sitting down in your favorite chair again, smelling the familiar smell and feeling the cushions conform to your body with the perfection of long practice.

The sky became dull again as the light disappeared, leaving only a brown-blue color. It looked like a bruise.

"What are you doing up here?"

He jumped. He hadn't detected a single sound or indication that there was anyone else with him. His Auror training had drilled the ability to sense the moment anyone came within a fifty-foot radius of him. Whirling around, he saw a tall person dressed in black standing by the elevator.

They were far enough away that he couldn't see their expression, but their voice had a distinct note of authority in it that made him respond.

He didn't know what else to say, so he apologized and said he was lost.

The person, who he now saw was a man, stepped away from the elevator and came striding across the expanse of unstained white carpet to tower over him. He really was very tall indeed, with bizarrely long hair the color of steel. It was almost down to his knees, an immaculate curtain of silvery fiber. It shone in the faint lighting, well-cared for and smelling of a masculine plant Harry didn't know the name of.

Harry flicked his eyes up to meet his, just for a second, and saw that they glowed green like the jade responsible for his presence here.

"Where are you supposed to be? You are clearly not an employee."

His voice was clipped and reminded Harry of the grizzled military generals he tried to negotiate with during the course of the Second War. When Harry didn't respond, too busy trying to form a coherent sentence, he asked,

"Do you have the clearance to be up here?"

Harry took a risk and shook his head. The man closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them again, his mouth in a hard straight line. It was a nice mouth. Thin, nicely-shaped lips just pink enough to look healthy covered straight white teeth. His whole face was nice, now that Harry was paying attention to it. Cheekbones fit for a statue with a nose just the size and shape it ought to be to match his eyes. Thin eyebrows the color of his hair, which meant it wasn't dyed like Rhoda's.

"Come with me."

Inside the elevator with this man, Harry wondered who he was and why he had the clearance to be on the top floor of the Shinra building. Feeling bold as the floors steadily dropped, he said,

"My name is Harry. Who are you?"

The man gave him an incredulous look, a flash of amusement in his eyes. he was probably very famous, to be giving him that kind of look. Harry flushed but held his eyes. it wasn't his fault he was foreign.

"I am General Sephiroth. I command the Shinra Military."

Harry 'oh'-ed and nodded, sinking back into silence. Sephiroth spoke next.

"Why are you here?"

"Just visiting. I wanted to go to the roof."

Sephiroth frowned, "This is not a place for tourists."

"I didn't know that. I am sorry to take time from your day with my foolishness." He wasn't sure if he structured his sentence properly, but he tried very hard. It must have come across more informal than he meant, because Sephiroth actually smirked a little. Harry got the feeling that he didn't smile easily.

Why should he? He was a General.

"Where are you from? Your accent is very…interesting."

Harry didn't know what that last word meant, but the tone it was said in conveyed that Sephiroth thought he talked weirdly. He scowled.

"I come from London. It's a small village across the sea. I came here to see Shinra."

Sephiroth gave him a tiny nod, "Well, now you have seen Shinra, and now you can go back home."

"Maybe."

The elevator stopped at the lowest level and Sephiroth pointed to the doors that led out into the residential areas of the Upper Plate. Harry walked towards them and then looked over his shoulder to see where Sephiroth was going. He was heading in the opposite direction, to the wide metal doors labeled, 'Shinra Military Compound'.

Harry decided he would break in there next and see what their military was like. It would be the best place to find some more Materia, too.

His desire to see what was beyond those doors had nothing to do with wanting to see Sephiroth again. Nothing at all.

~000~

End chapter 3


	4. Chapter 4

A/N: In which Harry gets into yet more trouble.

Chapter 4

Harry tried to find somewhere to sleep, preferably a dumpster as they were contained and provided protection from the eyes of undesirables, but the dumpsters here were all bolted shut. The local equivalent of police made regular, thorough patrols. He was stopped for vagrancy twice and made up fictitious social engagements to justify why he was walking around alone after dark.

Apparently there was a curfew.

He finally found the Red Light District and strolled around looking for a likely corner to lay low in for the night, and maybe catch a nap. A full night's sleep was looking unlikely. Yet again he found himself wondering what compelled him to leave behind his comfortable life on Earth. There he had a support network, position in society, and more money than there were charities to donate to. Here he was nothing, a bug on the windshield of the speeding city. He had no money and no home, and he wasn't sure if Rhoda counted as a friend. He decided that she didn't.

The rooftops here were thin and treacherous. His foot fell through the plaster more than one before he learned to stick to the edges where the plaster was thicker. It must not rain here at all, he decided.

He found a garden on top of the highest-class brothel available and fell asleep on the pebbled walk between two flowerbeds filled with growing vegetables. He woke sometime in the night to the sounds of gunshots. He wondered what happened to the gun he stole last time he was here, as it hadn't been on him when he arrived on Earth. Neither had any of the money come back.

He supposed he was lucky he kept his clothes somehow.

Looking over the edge of the three-storey brothel, he looked around for the source of the altercation. There was nothing. Everyone below walked around as though nothing had happened. The streetwalkers continued to pop their gum and puff their cigarettes. He frowned. That was weird.

Lying back down, this time on a pallet of straw that he found in the garden shed, he went back to sleep.

He dreamt about Sephiroth. Come morning he supposed no one could blame him. Sephiroth was an uncommonly attractive man, and he _had _been wearing leather when they met. He peeked out of the shed for any sign of the gardener that owned his refuge. There was a man watering the tomato-like vegetables. Harry sighed and hopped from foot to foot as he waited; he needed a piss and there was no way he was doing it in this nice man's shed. That would be impossibly rude.

Finally he couldn't hold it any longer and tried to sneak out. The man must have heard something because his head whipped around and he yelled when he saw Harry.

Harry bolted for the roof's edge and leapt across the alley onto the next. He lost his balance and fell on his arse, but picked himself back up again and kept running. He ran until he found a building low enough with a dumpster against its side to get down. He relieved himself in the alley, vibrating with adrenaline and wondering if the man would call the police.

He hoped not. A criminal record would be bad under any circumstances, but he had a feeling that the discovery that he didn't have identification of any kind would not be a good situation to get into.

There were no food carts here to steal a bite to eat from, and he had very little money. He knew a ticket back to the slums was cheap, but he still hadn't had a chance to explore the rest of the Shinra buildings; particularly the ones pertaining to the military. He debated it for a while and then had a brilliant idea.

He sought out Rhoda's café. She wasn't there when he arrived, so he stole a newspaper from an unsuspecting old man and flipped to the jobs section. It was hard to decipher the symbols, but some of them were hieroglyphic-like. He looked for jobs with the Shinra stamp on them.

A small square in the lowest corner of the paper caught his eye. It had the Shinra stamp, and a series of symbols that made him think of someone that cleaned up gross things. Assuming it was a janitorial position; he carefully tore out the little square and then asked the nearest waitress for directions to the location printed at the bottom.

It was a little building on the same block as the Shinra building, just twenty stories high. Inside there were three other people around his age and younger. They looked at him with interest. He supposed the fact that he'd obviously slept in his clothes was what was interesting them. That or his hair, which was as stupid and unreasonable to grooming now as it'd been in his school day. It was usually one of those that attracted Muggle stares.

He crossed his legs and looked out the small window at the traffic. It was as orderly as clockwork and made his skin crawl to look at it. He was used to the chaos of London, not this passive cultish obedience to millions of little rules. He sighed loudly and the only girl glared at him. He scowled back and listened to the sound of the clock ticking.

The man that interviewed them was late, from what he gauged from the expressions of the other applicants. He was short and squat, with greasy hair and sweaty palms. His eyes lingered inappropriately on the female applicant. Harry fought to keep his lip from curling, feeling sorry for her and contemptuous of this imbecile.

He was interviewed last, probably because of his appearance.

He had to explain that he didn't speak the language very well.

"But I will work very hard and I don't care if the pay is small. I just want to have a good start; I want to work."

The man nodded, writing something down that Harry couldn't read even if it wasn't upside down.

"Are you squeamish at the sight of blood?"

Harry frowned, "This is a job for a janitor, right?"

"Not quite. The position is for a two-person cleanup team for the company's medical laboratories. You would be cleaning up anything from spilled Mako to various human fluids."

Harry blinked, the meaning sinking through. He was only a little squeamish about blood, so he said that he could handle the job just fine. The man smiled, looking relieved. Harry surmised that the other applicants must have seemed more hesitant about the human fluids part.

"Do you have a number I can call you at should we hire you?"

Harry blanked, "No?"

Instead of looking angry or disappointed, he just waved away this problem, "That's okay. You can just come back here tomorrow; same time, and wait in the room out there for an hour. If you're hired, I'll send someone to come get you. If not, you are free to go."

"Okay," Harry nodded, smiling. He didn't like this man personally, but he wanted to look as eager to work as possible. The man beamed and said he could go. Harry went, a spring in his step. He was more physically impressive than any of the other applicants, so there was a chance he would get hired for his ability to perform manual labor alone.

And the best part of this job was that he would be issued an I.D. card that would admit him into the Shinra building. He had every intention of abusing that privilege.

~000~

He spent the night in the unlocked garage of one of the businesspeople, where he had the good fortune to find a compact army blanket. He commandeered it, stuffing it in the torn backpack he scavenged from their neighbor's trash. Since showing up in the same clothes as yesterday might not be a good idea, he raided a boutique that sold trousers made form a material similar to denim. He picked a pair that were breathable and wouldn't cut off his circulation behind his knees if he squatted.

They didn't sell sweatshirts, so he had to satisfy himself with a button-down in plain blue cotton. It looked like a workman's shirt, and just as sturdy. There was nothing to be done about his shoes, which were just plain brown leather lace-ups. He did filch a few pairs of socks and a package of pants. He hated wearing dirty pants.

He waited for most of the hour, impatiently bouncing his knees and chewing his nails to the quick. A flustered-looking young woman in a lab coat came for him with five minutes left to his waiting period. She wore glasses and had her mouse-colored hair piled on top of her head in one of those 'I'm-very-intelligent-and-too-busy-to-do-this-properly' buns.

He smiled at her, and she fairly glowed at him. He wondered why, and then realized he gave her his 'celebrity smile'. It was the one he used when he was feeling insecure and wanted to make pubescent fan girls swoon. He flushed, feeling embarrassed for his instinct. Good god, what if he ended up seeing this girl every day? What if she turned into another Psycho Olive?

She took him into the Shinra complex through one of the little service entrances, the one on the east side. The walls were painted an unremarkable shade of beige, stained here and there with use. There was a little room with a bored middle-aged woman who took his photo and made it into a laminated I.D. card.

That accomplished, she then took him to an elevator recessed into the wall, separate from the others, and showed him the correct way to slide the card in to activate it. They rode the elevator in awkward silence, Harry painfully aware that she kept shooting him admiring looks. He regretted the smile so much right now.

The elevator had only two buttons, one for up and one for down. It came to a stop a good five minutes later and the doors opened to reveal a long hall painted in a painful shade of white. It smelled strongly of disinfectant and the vinegar of Mako. She made him put little plastic covers on his shoes, doing the same for herself.

He followed her down the hall to the third room on the right, which was an office. She handed him some paperwork.

He tried to explain to her that he couldn't read, but she just looked baffled and only pointed out where he was meant to sign. He supposed it was the usual waivers and warnings and removal of all legal responsibility. Some things didn't change.

This accomplished, she led him back out and further down to the sixth door. Inside was a lounge, with a pair of shabby sofas, a potted plant, and a vending machine. There was a counter with a coffee machine on it and several stacks of foam cups. The carpet was thin and raggedy with age beneath his feet. He wondered when the Shinra building was built.

The door opened and a grim-faced man in his mid-fifties entered. He nodded to the girl, whose name Harry still didn't know, and then came forward to thrust his hand into Harry's. When he introduced himself, Harry noticed that he too had a strong foreign accent. Except this man's accent was as foreign to Harry as his must've sounded to everyone he spoke to.

"I'm Victor. Call me Vic. We'll be a team, kid, you understand? You do what I tell you to do and don't squeal about it and we'll get on just fine."

Harry replied in halting words that he was happy to meet him and introduced himself. Vic grunted and poured himself some coffee. Harry copied him, wincing at the temperature. After his first gulp, Vic dismissed the girl,

"I can handle him from here, Fanny. You'd best get back to the labs before the doctor gets angry."

She nodded, a look of contempt flitting across her face when her superior was brought up. Harry wondered why; surely a man responsible for the well-being of the employees and SOLDIERS couldn't be all that bad. At least he had ethics, which is more than can be said for far too many people.

Once they finished their coffee Vic showed him where their lavatory was, gave him a ring of keys and began to show him what the keys went to. Once the tour was over, none of which involved going into any of the bolted-shut steel doors he was shown, Vic took him back the way they'd come through the maze to their bathroom. There was a closet next to it, full of uniforms. They were made of some kind of plastic and came complete with a helmet and heavy-duty gloves.

The door on the other side of the closet was a sort of communal shower area where they were meant to hose off the worst of the damage at every hour.

His eyebrows went up. Maybe he'd misunderstood. Was this a medical lab or not?

He got into his suit, because the other shift was about to end (Vic had timed their tour impeccably). It was not the most breathable garment he'd ever worn, nor the most comfortable. It smelled like the disinfectant and faintly of another man's aftershave.

Vic led him down the hall again, passing two other men in the suits. One of them had a large amount of bright purple fluid covering him, and the other had red up to his knees. Harry's instincts, which had been quietly panicking all day, began to scream at him. What, exactly, had happened to his predecessor?

Just then, when his private panic point was cresting, a long drawn-out wail came from one of the far rooms, followed by a loud 'bang'. None of the other janitors jumped. Feeling embarrassed and more than a little curious, Harry followed Vic to the very end of the hall. From what he understood, they would work their way back to the front and, if there were no emergencies, they should reach the end by the time their shift ended and they were replaced. Vic had him unlock the door, making sure that he understood how to match the correct key (there were a lot of them).

The view inside made Harry feel slightly sick. Three tanks were lined up, filled with Mako. Inside each of them was a man, one with a broken leg. As he watched, he saw that, ever so slowly, the tissue and bone were repairing themselves. He relaxed a little and followed Vic's lead, cleaning the glass with disinfectant and gathering the surgical supplies in a sealed container he retrieved from the pack on his back. The dirty tools were sealed inside and placed on their cart. There was a disinfecting room, complete with furnace, somewhere around the halfway point of the hall.

Each room was different. Some looked like normal operating rooms, complete with machines meant for life support. Others looked like they belonged in a butcher's shop.

After an hour of cleaning, Vic's radio crackled. Fanny's voice lisped that there was a body to be disposed of in room 107A. Vic responded that they were on their way. He pointed at Harry and ordered him to remember what room they were cleaning so they could return to it when they finished with the body.

Harry liked working with Vic. He didn't talk much, but when he did he explained himself clearly. Harry thought it might be because he had once struggled with the language as well, and sympathized. From what little Vic did say, Harry gathered that he was married with three children and lived in Sector 2 of the slums, one of the nicer ones. Harry feigned being worse at the language than he was to avoid talking about himself.

The body they retrieved and wheeled away on a cart wasn't human. It was some kind of eight-limbed creature that oozed purple blood intermittently and was still in the twitching stage of dying when they took it into the room next to the disinfecting room. There was just a big furnace here, with a platform for pushing bodies into the flames. They levered the creature onto it and Harry turned the wheel to send it into the furnace. It was insufferably hot in this room, and it amplified the sickly smell of the creature.

Just before the door snapped shut, he had a brief horrifying glimpse of the creature raising one of its tentacles and curling it.

~000~

Fanny rejoined them at the end of their shift, smile on her face. She had a nice smile, Harry had to admit.

"How was your first day?" she asked slowly, enunciating carefully. It made him feel like an idiot but he was grateful all the same.

"It was new. I am happy to be employed."

She laughed, "Yeah, it's not exactly a dream job down here. Anyway, I came here to tell you that your first flushing appointment is on Wednesday next week, directly after your shift ends."

He frowned, "Flushing…?"

"Oh! Sorry, I always assume people know what I'm talking about. The flushing process takes about two hours, during which you are given an enema," he didn't know what that word meant, "a powerful tonic that will flush your blood clean, and then a brief Mako shower to make absolutely sure that you don't have any infections. And if you have picked up anything, we'll keep you overnight to get it out of your system."

He asked for clarification and Vic took over.

"There is a lot of dangerous stuff in the air here, and the suits we wear can't protect us from all of the viruses. John, the last guy that had your job, skipped a flushing to go to a party he died of full organ failure two days later. You must never, ever miss a flush. They are the only thing protecting us. Also, if you feel weird at any point, tell Fanny _immediately._"

Harry's eyes were roughly the size of dinner plates. There had been no warning on the job application that this job was so dangerous! He wondered if this kind of information withholding was common in the Shinra bureaucracy. It probably was.

~000~

He tricked Fanny into letting him sleep on the lounge sofa because he didn't have living arrangements yet. She said it was against company policy and had to sneak him in when her shift ended. He was grateful to her despite her motives.

As he set up for the night on the sofa, she sat down on the other one and asked him what made him come to Midgar. He asked her what Midgar was and she explained, wide-eyed, that that was the name of the city.

"You came all this way without even knowing the name of this city?"

He shrugged, "I thought it was called Shinra."

"Oh. Well, I'm glad you came. Is your village very small?"

He nodded, "Yes."

Why wouldn't she leave?

She bit her lip, fiddling with a loose string on the sleeve of her lab coat, and then asked, "Harry, how old are you?"

"I don't know the numbers here. I am this many years," he flashed all ten fingers three times and then held up one, "how do you say that?"

"Thirty-one. Wow, you don't look that old."

He didn't know what else to do, so he just smiled, careful not to look too inviting. She smiled back and then seemed to get nervous again. She stood suddenly and gathered her purse and folders.

"Well, I should get going. Sleep well!"

"Thanks," he waved and then curled up under his army blanket.

He napped for several hours and then woke up at half-past two in the morning. Pulling on his shoes, grateful that their soles were so thin they made no sound as he walked, he began to strategize. His keycard would give him access to the rest of the building as long as he kept to the service areas; now the question was whether or not it would let him into the military compound.

It was worth a try. If it failed, it failed. He could always find some other way to get inside. If caught he could just say that he was new to the staff and wanted to have a look around in case he could get a second job in the regular buildings.

Out in the hall, he tested his card to make sure that it didn't have a timed deactivation. There wasn't one, and the door clicked open. He would have closed it, but he felt a waft of hot air from outside. Frowning, he opened it a little more and peeked around it. There was another door on the other end, open, with a set of concrete stairs that clearly led up and outside. The room was just a square concrete cell with a table and two chairs against one side, metal and bolted to the floor.

He entered the room, putting one of his spare socks in the door to keep it open just in case. There was a drain in the center of the floor. He looked up and found a metal ring with chains coiled neatly through it attached to the ceiling.

This was very likely an interrogation room, the kind that was never surveyed by cameras. The foot of the stairs had a rust-colored stain on the far corner, confirming his suspicions. He looked up the stairs as far as he could see, and caught a glimpse of an open door at the top.

Voices came echoing down suddenly and he ran, but not before catching a glimpse of a red-headed woman in a tight-fitting navy suit carrying a gun half her size.

He retrieved his sock at the last second and the door clicked shut just as she entered the room. He dove into the room opposite, knowing that anyone with a gun like that wouldn't let a little noise escape them. He heard the door open, the click of a gun safety being removed, and tried not to breathe. Then the door closed again, and he couldn't hear the sounds of her breathing anymore. He waited half an hour before he dared to slip out again.

In the mean time he investigated his hiding place. It was smaller than most of the other rooms, and everything inside was either white or steel. There was a cot undeserving of the title 'bed' against one wall and a chest of drawers against the other. A small toilet, sink, and shower were crammed against the third. There was no curtain for privacy.

He looked around for any indication that it was inhabited and found nothing but a mounted metal box on one side of the door. It was locked, but the label slot had a slip of paper in it. Square black type spelled out,

_JENOVA Project _

_Experiment 001_

_Sephiroth_

He memorized the information for later thought and then slipped out.

The elevator seemed to take an eternity to reach him. He chewed his nails impatiently and wondered desperately why there weren't stairs. What if that woman did a second check and saw him standing there?

The door opened just as the elevator landed. He sprang inside, whirling around to see the woman standing there with her gun pointed at him.

"Hold the doors!" she snapped, her voice sharp as broken glass, daring him to defy her, anything to give her an excuse to shoot. He obeyed. God only knew how big the bullets were in that gun. She wielded like it was a toy, light as air instead of weighing possibly 200 pounds.

She strode into the elevator and demanded to know what he was doing in the labs. He raised his I.D. card and said,

"I'm a janitor spending the night. I was just going up for a quick cigarette. They don't let us smoke in the labs."

She took the card from him and looked at it closely, glancing from the picture to his face and back again several times. She flipped it over and held it up to the fluorescent lights. He made an effort to keep his breathing steady and his expression neutral, focusing on anything but her examination. Her face was heart-shaped, pretty in a violent kind of way, like a lioness leaping for your throat. Her eyes glowed a faint blue even in the harsh hospital-like lighting.

"Okay, you check out. Have a nice night and sorry for disturbing you," she flashed him a toothy smile and stepped out of the elevator. Before he could close the doors, she said, "I see that it's your first day. Welcome to Shinra."

"Thanks."

The doors closed. He didn't sag against the opposite wall like he so desperately wanted to. There was a camera in this elevator and he wanted to maintain his façade of innocence. After all, he had every right to be here.

There was something about that woman. He'd known plenty of killers in his day, of all shapes and sizes, but there was something corporate about her. She was obviously some kind of assassin that did the company's dirty work. He hoped there were only a few, but knew logically that a corporation as big and influential as Shinra had to have a veritable army of people just like her.

He could only hope that she didn't remember his face.

The halls above were built on a simple grid pattern unlike the nonsensical snaking path of the labs below. He practically sauntered through them, affecting the mien of someone hopelessly lost for the sake of the cameras. Finally he stumbled across the main lobby and peeked into a few meeting rooms and the lounge for appearances sake.

Finally he went to the steel doors, out of place amid the lush marble and velveteen décor of the lobby, and tried his card.

The doors clicked open.

He took a deep breath and walked inside. The hall that greeted him was unremarkable, made from poured concrete. Labels for the steel doors set into the walls, presumably dormitories if he was reading the hieroglyphs right, were done in white paint. He explored for a while, noting that the cameras here only covered exits.

There were wide training spaces farther in, the walls gouged deeply from weapons in some places and scorched or cracked in others.

"How intense is the training here if the walls look like this?" he whispered out loud in English, putting his hands on his hips and surveying the years of damage. There were steel brackets against the far wall with neatly-rolled mats stacked in groupings of twelve and unsharpened sparring swords.

He was tempted to take one down for a swing but resisted. He hadn't handled a sword since the War and even then he wasn't the best. He could fumble his way through a fight with his usual luck, but that was only if his life was in danger. His luck only worked if someone honestly wanted him dead, he'd found.

"You again?"

Once again he'd had no indication from his instincts that he wasn't alone. This was not okay! Once he could blow off as a one-off, but twice? This was fast becoming a habit, and a dangerous one. He turned to look at Sephiroth.

Sephiroth leaned against the metal bar bolted to the right-hand wall, its purpose a mystery in Harry's eyes.

"Who let you in here?"

Harry held up his I.D. for the second time that night, "I did. I got a job, and thought I'd look around. The card worked, so I thought it would be okay. It opens doors I'm allowed in, right?" he knew for sure that his sentence structure was a little lacking, but it was better this time than it was at their last meeting.

Sephiroth thought about this.

"I'm going to discuss that with the Board."

Harry didn't know what he meant by that but said nothing. He stayed where he was, close to the swords. He didn't expect Sephiroth to attack him, but you never knew.

"Why do you want to look around here?" Sephiroth asked; there was a very faint note of curiosity in his business-like voice. Harry filed this away as a victory over his stoicism. He shrugged.

"I've never been in a military center before," that was a lie, but Sephiroth didn't know that, "if my job doesn't work out, I might sign up. SOLDIERS seem interesting."

Sephiroth had begun to slowly come closer. His eyes warmed just a little when Harry said this.

"Joining the army doesn't make you a SOLDIER. It's takes a lot of dedication to become a SOLDIER; you have to be stronger, smarter, and more resilient than your fellow recruits. And even then, if your body cannot acclimate to the Mako treatments, you are relegated to the regular infantry."

Harry smiled, "I'd still try. I like challenges." 

"And exploring, I can see. Curiosity is an easy way to get killed, Harry."

"Maybe."

Sephiroth let out a little breath, a bit like a sigh, and jerked his head to the door, "I'll give you a tour, and then you need to leave. I don't want you distracting the cadets on guard duty."

Harry did a jig inside the privacy of his mind. He hadn't thought that some semi-innocent snooping would result in a private tour! He fought the urge to skip and walked sedately beside his guide as he coolly showed him the sauna and ice room that they used to train their men to withstand extreme temperatures. The pool was the size of football field, and a few men were actually swimming in it. Harry checked the time. It was already four in the morning, so he supposed it wasn't really the middle of the night anymore.

They moved beyond the basic military and into the SOLDIER rooms. Sephiroth used his higher clearance to let them in, a fact that impressed Harry. Why was he taking the time to give him such a thorough tour? He probably had a dozen more important things to be doing with his time than consorting with the janitor.

There were rooms dedicated to hand-to-hand combat for the, simulation centers that let them fight to the death without actually dying, and separate dormitories. Finally there was a row of offices for the SOLDIER commanders. Harry skimmed their labels surreptitiously and committed the names to memory.

Zack Fair, Titus Goldwag, and Bessie Flaubert. And beyond them, set a little apart, was an office for General Sephiroth. He would have to investigate the others, just for fun.

"Well, this is the end. I'll let you out; hopefully your curiosity is satisfied now," Sephiroth said, guiding him back the way they'd come, "If I find you again, I'm reporting you for suspicious activity."

Harry nodded and kept his questions to himself, not wanting to push his luck.

He had every intention of coming back soon. Maybe he really would join the military. It would be less creepy than the labs, with the inexplicable spine-chilling sounds of agony and periodic calls to dispose of bodies.

~000~

A whole month of steady lab work went by, during which Harry continued to camp out in the staff lounge, this time without going out to explore like he wanted to.

He relaxed into a routine, picking up information here and there. He had yet to see the infamous Doctor Hojo that Fanny worked for, but from what he gathered, he didn't _want _to meet the good doctor.

The lack of anything more exciting than the occasional sounds from the interrogation room at night lulled him into a false sense of complacency. If he'd been more alert, the sudden late-night kidnapping of his person wouldn't have been such a surprise. Things had been awfully quiet lately, after all.

He found himself strapped to the chair in the concrete cell in his underwear, with the redheaded woman from before and a cohort also navy-clad staring him down. He raised his eyebrows in question when neither of them made any move to speak or explain why he was there.

"What have I done?"

Instead of answering him, she snapped her fingers and said to her partner, "See? I told you his accent was weird."

The man rubbed his chin, nodding. His hair was bright blue to match his eyes. There was a spike taller than he was with knives jutting from either end leaning against the wall, presumably his weapon.

"You were right," he turned to Harry, "Where are you from?"

"London; it's a very small village-"

He waved his explanations away. "You're lying. Nicolina brought me here because I have been to every city and every village, no matter how great or small, on this entire Planet. I have heard every language and can recognize any nationality. It's my specialty. But you…you are nothing I have ever heard."

Harry felt real fear build at the base of his skull. He fought it off, not wanting to do anything hysterical.

"Maybe you missed a village," he responded blandly. Drawing on his limited knowledge of their geography, he posited, "My village is deep within the caves of the Nibel Mountains. I am the first of my people to see the light of day for hundreds, maybe thousands of years."

Please, please, please let him buy it. If he died here he'd never get a chance to explain his idiocy to Ron and Hermione.

The blue-haired man frowned. Nicolina whispered something in his ear, also frowning. They turned to him at once.

"Your body language says you are lying. Nicolina is never wrong; it's _her _specialty."

Harry inwardly groaned and sagged with defeat. Damn it! Now how was he going to get out of this?

Nicolina hissed, "I suggest you start explaining yourself, Mr. Potter, because right now you are looking a lot like a terrorist. Plastic surgery is very advanced these days and can be bought cheap enough if you know where to go. You really aren't very tall either. For all we know you're a Wutain spy with a Western face, come to infiltrate our company. Did you think we wouldn't notice? Your accent is ridiculous, by the way."

The man added, "No one would blame us if we killed you."

Harry sighed.

"I am not a spy. I'm just curious."

Nicolina snorted, "Same thing, stupid," she reached into her pocket and drew out a device the size of a pencil. She pressed the bottom, activating a bright spark at the tip. She admired it for a moment, seemingly forgetting the business of the moment. And then without warning she jabbed it into his bare thigh.

He yelled, feeling like his entire leg was being electrocuted. His training made him want to separate from the pain and show no indication of it, but he kept his wits enough to not do so. That would only make these people more suspicious. What business did a janitor have knowing how to overcome pain?

The device was withdrawn after half a minute. He forced himself to look like he was in more pain than he was actually feeling. The cruciatus kind of destroyed the ability for normal torture to bother you. He kept his eyes closed to hide their lack of dilation.

"Who are you?"

He didn't answer. She jabbed it into his other leg, higher up the thigh this time, threateningly close to his groin. He shriveled up a little with genuine fear. High pain tolerance or not, he didn't want his balls electrocuted by some psycho.

It was taken out after a minute. He could feel blood oozing from the holes where it'd broken the skin. He faked a whimper.

"Come on, Harry, tell me what you're doing here. I don't want to have start cutting off your fingers."

The man took a piece of Materia from his pocket, and Harry perked up.

"How about we give him a little chill first?" he began to rub it with his fingers, lips moving silently as he, presumably, cast a spell.

Ice surrounded Harry, but had no effect on him. He blinked innocently at them. Nicolina stared while her counterpart examined his Materia, believing it to be defective. The ice dissolved and turned to iridescent blue butterflies that fluttered around the room before disappearing.

"What the hell?"

Harry took advantage of their confusion to jerk his body forward. The straps strained and snapped, weakened by the cold. His forehead touched the Materia, still held in the man's hand. He saw a flash of white light and then felt himself dissolve.

~000~

End chapter 4


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

At first he didn't know where he was. Dressed in only his thin scrap of underwear, he was buffeted by freezing winds and pelted with hail the size of bird pellets. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to curl into a ball. He found himself sliding down something at a rapid pace and grabbed onto the nearest object to stop his fall. It was a gable.

He opened his eyes. It was dark and the hail was in his eyes, but he became aware that he was on a roof. The roof of a turret, to be more specific; in fact, to be absolutely accurate, he was perched on Gryffindor Tower.

He let out a screech of alarm and scrambled on top of the gable, clinging to it with all four limbs desperately.

"What in the fuck?" he shouted for no one's benefit but his own, teeth chattering.

It took him two hours and countless near-death experiences via almost falling off the roof to work open the gable's narrow window. He wedged his shoulders inside somehow and slithered the rest of his body in afterwards.

He landed in a heap on the floor of the 3rd year girl's dormitory. There was a lot of screaming and pillows thrown at his head and finally a Head of House was produced. Harry had never met her, but her thin-lipped expression told him that it wouldn't have made any difference. Wet and dirty and clad in his underwear, he was unrecognizable as the Man-Who-Lived.

He was escorted to the Headmistress' office. He kept silent the whole way, shivering occasionally. He was really going to have to find some way to aim where he landed next time.

Exactly when he opened his mouth to explain why he was in his underwear and terrorizing young girls, the cotton-headed feeling descended. He curled into a little ball, clutching his head. And then the electrocution torture from before decided to give him some aftershocks, causing his body to convulse and thrash on the floor of McGonagall's office; dimly he could hear Madam Pomfrey being called for.

He sank into unconsciousness.

~000~

He woke up in a room so white that for a moment he thought he was back in the labs, that his episode had been only a bad dream.

This was not the case. The soft cooing sound of magical life support made it amply apparent that he was, indeed, back in England. He tried to sit up and couldn't. He frowned and tried again without success. Confused now, he put his chin on his chest and crossed his eyes to see what the problem was.

The problem was that he was strapped to the bed. He investigated further and discovered via recognizing the wall art that he was in the Ward for the Mentally Unsound at St. Mungo's Magical Hospital.

He groaned and flung his head back onto his pillow. And then he winced, because his head still felt a little thicker than usual and his whole body felt battered.

He really ought to have seen this coming. Skipping off into 'limbo' willingly and without warning, not to mention breaking and entering into the Dept. of Mysteries and possibly damaging a valuable magical artifact…

From the perspective of an outsider, it did not look good.

Someone stirred on the edge of his vision. He turned his head and saw Hermione asleep in the chair beside his head. He whispered her name, not wanting to shock her out of sleep. She looked tired, grey circles under her eyes and short hair wilder than usual. She didn't stir so he sighed and tried to think about how he was going to get out of this one.

People had thought he was crazy in the past, but this was the only time he would agree with them. He didn't know what it was about Midgar but he couldn't stay away. Especially now that he had spent more than five minutes in Sephiroth's company. He had thought that Dumbledore had a special magnetism to his personality, but he looked like a refrigerator magnet in comparison with Sephiroth's industrial-grade ability to pull him in.

He didn't understand it at all. Sephiroth barely spoke to him and kept his face and voice as modulated as humanly possible. He had given Harry no verbal indication that he was interested in any way, but his actions…why would he not have Harry arrested for trespassing on their first meeting? And why would he take time out of his schedule to give him a tour on their second?

Maybe none of this even mattered anymore. How was he going to get back there? If even Hermione thought he was crazy, then there was no way he was getting out of St. Mungo's.

Harry fell asleep wondering about Sephiroth's motives anyway.

When he woke up a second time, Hermione had been replaced with Ron. He was scribbling Auror reports using a clipboard, the tip of his tongue poking out like it used to back in school when he was fumbling his way through a Potions essay. Harry smiled at him and whispered,

"Hey."

Ron's head snapped up and he grinned. He dropped his clipboard and leaned forward to wrap his arms around Harry's neck, speaking in an incoherent mush of affection and reproach. Harry couldn't hold him back, still strapped down like a criminal, so he just let Ron cling to him until he was done having his emotional episode.

Ron finished hugging him and leaned back, still seated on the edge of the bed.

"Mate, where were you? You were gone for almost a year!"

Harry frowned. No he wasn't! He was gone for a little over a month. He knew this because if you added the time he spent wandering around to the time he spent working, it equaled just about a month and a half. Six weeks was hardly a year.

"What? No…it didn't feel that long. It couldn't have been that long."

Ron looked sad.

"Never mind how long you were gone. Time there is probably different than it is here, being limbo and everything. Why'd you do it?" before Harry could answer, he added, "We thought you were happy to be home. You were acting your old self, so we didn't think anything was wrong. And then you went and left of your own free will."

Harry couldn't look at him. He didn't have a satisfactory answer for himself, so how could he answer Ron?

"Don't you like us, Harry? Are you unhappy?"

He didn't want to, but he answered, "Yes. I like you all, I _love _all of you," he twitched his fingers so that they touched Ron's, "but I'm not happy. Not here."

Ron looked like he'd been hit. Harry had never felt lower in his life. He kept on talking.

"I don't know what's wrong with me. I just can't be normal! I tried. I've tried really hard; the last ten years of my life have been a slow-burning hell but I kept trying. Back when we were fighting the war I wanted it to be over so badly. When it finally was, I didn't know what to think. I didn't know what to do with myself."

Ron hesitated and then asked, "What about Ginny? She loved you, you know."

"I could never be the person she was in love with, Ron. We both know that. You know all about my weaknesses and my flaws; she never saw them. I don't think she even believed I was capable of being wrong or stupid or even tired."

They were silent, both having said all there was to say for the time being. Then Harry asked,

"Why am I strapped to this bed?"

Ron leapt on the change of subject, "You were having some kind of fit when Madam Pomfrey found you. She didn't know what was wrong, so they called St. Mungo's. They strapped you to a stretcher and then to this bed and waited for you to stop. You didn't stop for three hours; we all thought you were cursed. And then you just went limp and didn't wake up when we shook you or called your name."

Harry's eyebrows went up. He had a seizure for three hours? The electrocution Nicolina used hadn't been that powerful. Maybe it was a side effect of jumping back to Earth when his leg was still quivering. The jump could've amplified it, or maybe the technology she used didn't exist here and there was some kind of SNAFU on the part of the Universe as it tried to incorporate it properly into this world.

He must have been quiet for too long because Ron said, voice grave, "Harry, they think you're mad. The Minister is furious and Skeeter is all over this. I don't know how she found out, but I strongly suspect that she cornered one of the guys at the Dept. of Mysteries and pumped him for details on who stole the jade and then found you were involved."

"So…what does this mean? Will they force me to go to therapy or a support group for limbo addicts?"

Ron snorted, "No," and then he was serious again, "when I said they think you're mad, I meant they think you are clinically insane. It's impossible to be completely alone with yourself, doing nothing, for almost a year without going a little loopy."

"What? Says who?"

He shrugged, "Some expert. Remember that really fat doctor you had a debate with at the 7th Victory Celebration at the Ministry about the meaning of murder?"

Harry nodded, "Yeah, that guy hates me. He gives me dirty looks every time I see him at those functions; it's so stupid, too. All I did was win one little argument."

"Yeah, well, he's the expert that said you're crazy."

"What? Fuck! Now I'm never getting out of here. Please tell me he didn't volunteer to 'over-see my case'."

Ron just looked at him.

"Fuck."

~000~

Harry spent three months in the hospital. His daily routine started with being given a spit-bath by a male nurse twice his size named Denny who enjoyed telling him what people were saying about the Boy-Who-Lived's madness. Then he was strapped to a chair and wheeled into an eating area, where he was spoon-fed by Mary, who resembled a cold fish and felt like one whenever their skin touched. He wasn't very fond of Marry, who muttered insults about the other nurses and was a little rough.

Then he was wheeled into therapy, where Dr. Desmond Nadelberg, the same man that hated him for proving him wrong, asked probing questions. Harry knew that no amount of cooperation or 'signs of growth' were going to get him out of there like the other patients, so he kept a stony silence. He wasn't going to give that bastard the satisfaction of getting inside his head.

Another feeding session with Marry, then an afternoon spent still strapped to his chair in the common room with the other patients. He tried to make friends during the first week of his stay, but these patients were considerably more unhinged than he was and he didn't have anything in common with any of them.

A final feeding session and then he was wheeled into the physical therapy room. He liked Yorick, his 'trainer', a lot. Yorick was the only person there that didn't think he was crazy. _And _he wasn't strapped to the chair there. He was allowed an hour of yoga to stretch him out, a 20-minute run on the circular track, and then 10 minutes to just move about freely. He treasured those times in physical therapy. Yorick told him what was going on outside and, if Harry asked, about how his family was doing. Yorick's young daughter had a nameless magical malady that caused sporadic full-body paralysis. It was a struggle just to make sure that she kept breathing, not to mention the many injuries she got from falling down.

He felt sane here, talking like a human and moving like a free man.

He'd tried to escape time and time again, but the wards were rock solid and even his limited wandless magic capability was no match for the breadth and complexity of the invisible walls.

The thought of suicide had crossed his mind but was discarded. It was unbearable in here but he treasured his life. When you were dead you were done, but while you still lived there was hope of escape or of someone noticing that Desmond was a twisted son of a bitch that was lying about Harry's mental state.

He wasn't allowed visitors for a long time because of his escape attempts, but he'd been good lately so finally he was visitors. Hermione and Ron came together but were only allowed in one at a time. Hermione cried the whole time she was there. Ron tried to be cheerful and told him about how Rose was doing at Hogwarts. He said he'd bring her over when the Christmas holidays rolled around.

Neville came to tell him about his wife, who Harry knew nothing about, and even Ginny came, though their session was extremely awkward.

And then Luna came to see him. She snuck chocolate in somehow and fed him half the bar, breaking it into squares. She didn't talk much except to tell him some news about her father's health. Just when he was beginning to think that she wasn't going to talk anymore, she leaned forward and whispered in his ear that she knew why he did it.

He stared, not knowing what she meant.

She held up her left hand. On her thumb was a little green ring made of jade. Before he could open his mouth to beg for it or ask how she figured it out what was really going on, she took it off and put it on him. She muttered some words he didn't understand but recognized as Mandarin and then the jade began to glow. It's magic set off the alarms.

He vanished to the sounds of their shrieking, his straps and sheets sinking down in a rumpled heap without his body. Luna, sitting alone, smiled a little sadly and said, "Goodbye" even though the room was empty.

~000~

Harry landed on his back on a bed of flowers. They smelled like lilies, and he could see their white and yellow goblet-shaped blooms around him. He struggled to breathe; the fall had taken the wind out of him.

"Hello? Is someone there?"

It was a woman's voice, a young one. He sat up slowly, wincing. The impact wasn't as bad this time, but it was still a bit of a shock from the mental ward. He hadn't seen anything alive other than people, much less sunshine, for months. Turning his head carefully, not wanting to do something weird to his neck, he saw a woman by the doors. Looking around, he saw he was in a church of some kind. He didn't know Midgar had churches, much less the kind that evoked Christianity.

"Oh, I didn't see you there!" she called, waving. She seemed friendly and was petite enough that he could take her in a fight if she turned out to be psycho like so many people in the slums. He knew he was in the slums because he could smell the vinegar of Mako in here beneath the flower's perfume, though the accompanying stench of garbage was absent.

He got to his feet somehow. Swaying in place, he debated the wisdom of that move.

She, whoever she was, walked over to him. She held a spade in one glowed hand and came up to his chin. He couldn't put his finger on what it was, but something about her reminded him of Luna. Maybe it was something in the eyes; that look that said she already knew what you were going to say before you opened your mouth.

She smiled up at him, brushing a bit of dirt from her pink skirt.

"I'm Aerith; it's nice to meet you...?"

"Harry, Harry Potter," after three months away from it, it was hard for him to understand what she was saying. Two steps forward, three steps back. It was maddening but it made him feel alive. Maybe he really was a challenge-junkie like Dr. Desmond said, whatever that meant.

"Hi, Harry. Say, how did you get in here?"

He, stumbling over his words, asked her to repeat that. She asked again, slower this time.

"I fell in."

She looked up at the hole in the ceiling which he hadn't noticed before. It was through that which the light was streaming, bathing the flowers. He wondered how the sun was puncturing the Plate, as he didn't remember seeing a corresponding hole in it when he last explored.

"I really ought to get that fixed, but it's so good for the flowers I keep putting it off," she explained, "I hope you didn't hurt yourself too badly."

"No, no, I'm okay. Just out of breath," he tapped his chest in case he got the word wrong.

"Are you from the Upper or Lower Plate? If you're from Upper, I'll pay for your ticket as an apology," she stooped as she spoke and began gathering the flowers at their feet. When she had a half-dozen she rose again and reached into her pocket. Drawing out a ribbon, she used it to tie their stems together. She handed them to him, "And take these as well. The scent will help if you've got any headaches from the jolt."

He accepted the flowers, not knowing why she was giving them to him. He sniffed them absently and smiled. They smelled unbelievable. She smiled at him again and jerked her head at the door,

"Come on; let's go find you some water."

Harry followed obediently. She had a long braid of brown hair that reached the small of her back. It swayed hypnotically as she walked. He had to wonder how a girl who looked like Aerith wasn't involved in the sex industry like every other remotely attractive woman under the Plate. There were seemingly only a few occupations in the Slums and most of them fell under sex, drugs, or liquor.

She got a bottle of water from a charming wooden cart filled with flowers that was resting against the outer wall of the church. Presumably it belonged to her. She removed the cap and handed it to him.

"So what do you do for a living?" she asked, obviously wanting to talk to him and not knowing what else to say.

"Nothing right now; I got fired a month ago and have been living off my old wages," he spoke haltingly, embarrassed but already remembering more of the language as he used and heard it.

"What? That's horrible! Where are you from? Your accent is really different."

He almost said London but remembered the navy suits. If they really were the dirty hands of Shinra, they would be keeping their ears open for news of anyone from 'London'. Instead, he said, "The Northern Crater."

She made an impressed noise, "Really? Well you are a long way from home, aren't you? How are you adjusting to the warm weather?"

They chatted for maybe an hour during which she periodically asked how he was feeling, ending up in the church weeding. He was surprised anything could grow down here at all, much less weeds, and volunteered to help her for the sake of touching something living and free.

"Do you have anywhere to stay?" she finally asked after another hour had gone by. He was dreading the time he would have to leave. Where would he go? The city was no doubt full of informants. He would suspect Aerith as well if only she looked capable of hurting a fly. But she didn't have a harmful bone in her body; she was ridiculously wholesome and nicer than nice.

"No," he answered honestly.

"Well…my mom wouldn't like me bringing you home, much less my boyfriend, but I think I can sneak you into our attic. You could sleep there until you get a job and can afford someplace."

"I wouldn't want to invade-"

She snapped her fingers, shutting him up. "Let me re-phrase that. You're going to sleep in my attic until you either get a job or leave the city. I recommend the second option. I don't want the Turks finding you; I'm sure whatever you did, you don't deserve to die for it."

"Turks?" he parroted, utterly confused by this point. Who wanted him dead now?

"Yeah; you know, navy suits, big weapons?"

He finally understood. "Are there pictures of my face out?"

"Mm-Hm. With a reward and everything; I don't know what you did, but they aren't happy about it."

He cursed in English. It would appear that he had leapt from the frying pan into the fire.

~000~

Aerith's attic was so small they had to stoop inside, but it was a free refuge and there was an old mattress there. He wasn't going to complain. Thanking her profusely, he promised to not overstay his welcome. She laughed and said he was welcome to stay as long as he needed.

"I'm not exactly best friends forever with the Turks," she added cryptically before disappearing back to the main level of the house. He wondered what that meant as he settled in. Aerith seemed harmless; what had she done to get on the wrong side of the Turks?

He moved cautiously the next morning. Checking the paper, he had Aerith help him find a couple of jobs and explain to him where they were. She wished him luck and safety. He hesitated and then kissed her cheek. He had no words to express his gratefulness.

The first job was as a dishwasher. The man at the door took one look at him and shook his head, saying he didn't want any trouble. He didn't care how hard Harry would work or for how cheap.

The next job turned him down and the one after that. Halfway through the morning he realized he was being followed by a man in slightly nicer rags than those of the denizens. He lost him by cutting several sharp corners and then hopping the fence into a gated-off warehouse area.

He waited by the gates for a while before getting bored. He'd run out of jobs to apply to. It was quickly becoming clear that, while the Midgarians wouldn't report him, they weren't going to associate with him either for fear of becoming targets of the Turks by proxy.

There were three warehouses here. As he surveyed them, he saw a monster the size of a donkey sidle around the corner of one and into a shadowy doorway. He shivered. This one had been a mammal with four legs but with a stomach so full it dragged on the ground. A glimpse of its genitalia told him it wasn't female, and therefore it wasn't babies that were weighing down its stomach.

He was careful as he peeked in the first warehouse. Its locks were easy to break and the keypad sequence was 1-2-3-4; he had to wonder who designed the security.

The boxes inside held canned beans, three different types of fruit, and a kind of grain in plastic containers; he put them away as he'd found them and looked around some more, hoping for a weapons cache. He would feel more comfortable if he was armed somehow. He wasn't bad in a fight, but most of the locals carried at least a telescoping rod on their person. He couldn't blame them. The government seemed to ignore them for the most part. They didn't have the strict police of the Upper Plate to keep them in line.

The next warehouse over had spare parts for delivery trucks and what looked like motorcycles.

He checked the last one for lack of anything better to do.

However, unlike the other two, this warehouse contained a group of thirty disreputable-looking people sitting in a rough circle. One of their numbers was standing and gesticulating expansively as he, it seemed, argued passionately for some cause. Harry couldn't understand most of what he was saying, but it sure looked interesting.

They didn't notice him for several minutes. It was a young woman who got up to go to the bathroom that spotted him. She shrieked and drew her handgun, firing without aiming. He ducked and the bullet smashed a hole in the door behind him the size of his fist. He didn't know what kind of ammunition they had here, but it freaked him out.

The group converged on him before he could escape. Two guys close to Hagrid's size grabbed his arms and two more grabbed his legs. He was carried bodily over to a chair and tied to it with thin nylon rope. He didn't bother to yell; no one was going to help him.

A space was made around him at the sharp command of their leader, the man who was speaking earlier. He lurched over, one leg a metal stump, and asked who he worked for. His voice was hard as stone.

Harry replied, "I don't work for anybody. I am just a foreigner looking for work. I thought maybe that there would be someone here looking for to hire a man to move boxes onto trucks. I didn't mean to walk in on your meeting. I am very sorry," he took a deep breath and decided to play the noble card, "I will understand if you have to kill me to protect yourselves."

There was silence.

Then a man so thin Harry wondered how he was still alive came into the circle and asked, "Say, isn't that the guy the Turks are looking for?"

A chorus of voices broke out and someone actually produced a rolled up poster that they held next to his face for comparison. Harry turned his head to look at it. It was indeed him. From the angle of the shot and his attire, it was taken from the feed of a security camera, enlarged, and cleaned up to make his features more distinguishable. He was wearing his plastic laboratory gear minus the helmet, a faint frown on his face. It wasn't a bad picture.

He didn't understand their currency completely just yet, but he could tell that the number underneath the picture was a big one.

"It's him all right. That or his twin brother."

Some laughter followed this and then the leader asked, "What did you do? They want a fuck-load of money for your ass, so we know it was something big."

Harry blinked and tried to think. What _had _he done? Some mild trespassing? Okay, that was an understatement. He had been very close to the President's private quarters without a clearance pass. He had also been down in the labs, where there was a lot of sensitive information about the SOLDIER program. And then there were the accusations of being a spy for Shinra's enemy Wutai.

With that final accusation on his head, the other stuff started to look really suspicious.

Out loud he said, "Suspicious activity. They thought I was a spy. But I'm not."

The leader snorted, "What did you do to make them think that? I doubt you just stood there and let them get weird ideas."

Harry shrugged as best as he was able, "Okay, so maybe I wandered around in some places I wasn't supposed to. But I didn't even touch anything!"

A woman in her 40s piped up, "What kind of places?"

"I don't know, the labs, military compound…the top of the Shinra building."

A girl gasped.

"And then there was some problem with my accent."

The leader nodded, "I can see that. Your accent is fucking weird."

Harry began to hope that they weren't going to kill him. If he was lucky these were rebels.

"Move him into the closet. We'll have a discussion about what to do with him."

Harry's chair was lifted and stored in a dank room with a pair of mops and a bucket. One of the mops sagged and its fibers got in his face. He squirmed away from it in the dark and heard the low growl of a monster.

~000~

End chapter 5

And once again Harry has stepped in shit. Twice.


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter 6

The growling creature turned out to a cat perched on the shelf above his head. Thin stripes of light from the edges of the door allowed Harry to see it crouched there, teeth bared at being disturbed. When he made no move to disturb it further, its hackles went down and it shuffled forward to bat at a piece of the mop. He sighed. He could only hope that nothing more dramatic happened to him today, but that was highly unlikely.

All he wanted was to have a little excitement! And then he saw Sephiroth, so now he wanted to get to know the General as well. Were those things too much to ask for? Harry had spent most of his life in the service of others. Even during his ten years of being an office flunky, he organized fundraisers and charity events to help the U.K. heal after the horrors of the Second War.

He was a good person, damn it! Why didn't things ever work out for him? He deserved a _little_ happiness, surely. He knew a little happiness wouldn't be enough, though. Nothing was ever enough for him.

"Is anyone ever satisfied?" he wondered out loud in English, closing his eyes. He supposed not. He certainly wasn't. His presence here was proof enough of that fact.

The door opened and his chair was hauled out. The people he'd mentally labeled 'hooligans' gathered in front of him, some having hushed conversations. As one they went silent. Their leader stepped to the front and said,

"We've talked it over and we decided to let you live," Harry breathed a sigh of relief, "for now. If you try anything funny, don't think you'll live a second longer. Do you understand, foreign boy?"

Harry nodded, "I understand. Thank you." 

"Hey, don't thank me yet. Your life isn't free. You said you got into the top of the Shinra building and we want to know how."

Harry frowned, "I didn't do anything fancy. I just climbed until I found an open window and then I took the elevator up. Nobody tried to stop me. If someone hadn't found me at the top I could've given myself a full tour."

They gaped at him like he was some kind of alien. The thin man from before stuttered, "No Turks tried to shoot you? No SOLDIERS came to tear you limb from limb?"

Harry shook his head, "No."

"Man, what the fuck? You got to be lying!"

There were similar exclamations. Harry didn't understand what the big deal was. He just went to the top floor of what was, for all intents and purposes, an office building. An office building you could _climb _with no special equipment and in semi-daylight too without getting caught. Had no one else thought of this? Really, it was unbelievable.

"Okay, okay, settle down people," the leader held up his hands until they got quiet. When he could hear himself speak, he asked Harry what his name was.

"Harry Potter. Who're you?"

He grinned.

"My name is Hector and I am the leader of the Centripetal Rebels. You've probably heard of us. Next to AVALANCHE we're the most fearsome threat to the Shinra elite. We are responsible for the new food program, you know. All it took was a little hostage taking and some demands and now we don't need to wonder if there will be any food deliveries come the first of the month."

Harry didn't know what to say to that declaration so he asked, "What does centripetal mean?"

"It means moving or directed towards a center or axis, which is what we're doing. We're going to make it to the Shinra elite and remove them before they can hurt us any more than they already have with their tyranny and oppression."

Definitely rebels, Harry internally groaned, complete with charismatic leader. Hector probably had a pathological edge too and intended to become the new President as soon as the old one was dead. This was just…so wonderful.

He was untied. Over the next hour he was introduced to the members of the rebel group, supposedly the largest in the city. The skinny man was named Kapil, the girl that first saw him only went by the letter M, and Hector's right-hand man, who Harry had missed before, was named simply Fred. Fred was 400 pounds, bald, and wielded a club studded with bits of glass and sharp metal spikes.

Harry had no intention of getting anywhere near Fred in a friendly or unfriendly way. Fred was the kind of guy you run away from if you can. Harry settled for nodding politely and then ignoring him as hard as he could while repeating a protective spell over and over in his mind. He didn't know how much good it would do but he would take all the help he could get.

Rebels were always crazy. He knew this because he used to be one.

It came out that they were planning to raid the Military compound that night for weapons, but now that Harry was there they wanted him to 'prove himself' by demonstrating how he scaled the building to a team of their members. The team consisted of two over-enthusiastic teenaged boys (Harry already saw problems there) whose names Harry immediately forgot and a woman about his age named Fain. Unlike Harry she actually looked 30.

He only remembered her name because she accidentally broke three of his fingers when she shook his hand. She wasn't someone you messed with, obviously.

Materia was taken out to heal his hand. He recoiled, not wanting to go home just yet. And then he remembered he was still wearing the ring from Luna. He let their healer cast the spell on his hands. Instead of having no effect like the faulty ice spell the male Turk cast on him during his torture session, this time the magic sank into his hand. There was a green glow and then suddenly his hand was fixed. Just like that.

He was impressed.

In the back of his mind he tried to figure out what Luna must have done to keep him there. He remembered her Mandarin words. Perhaps they were a spell, or maybe a prayer? He wasn't sure but he'd like to know what she did to him. If somebody tried to freeze him or set him on fire again he would like to know how scared he should be.

And then they discussed how Fain was going to assassinate the President. Harry slouched in his chair and began to despair about making it to tomorrow alive. 'Proving himself' was looking rather intense.

~000~

Several hours later he was scaling the side of the Shinra building. He was sixty floors up and moving horizontally to get around the massive red Shinra logo. As he sidled along, the timer caused it to light up. It was very bright from this close and he could hear the teenagers complaining.

Fain wasn't the chatty kind and he had nothing to say to the idiot twins, so they climbed in silence for the most part.

He didn't see why they needed to have a training expedition for this. Climbing was easy; there were a lot of buildings in the slums; surely the youth had some form of parkour developed by now? And why, oh why, did he have to be part of the team in charge of assassinations?

Everything was going smoothly until one of the boys slipped and fell several stories. He caught himself on one of the beams and squealed for help. His friend was frozen with fear. He looked at Fain and she curtly said, "Leave him."

He made to continue climbing but the boy's friend started to wail and screech at them for being 'heartless sons of bitches'. Fain's lips thinned and Harry knew he needed to fix this before both the boys got their necks broken by her and he somehow ended up getting blamed for it.

Harry descended as quickly as he dared to the boy's side and helped him get his feet back into alignment. Why he couldn't figure this simple process out on his own was a mystery. Was everyone here brain-damaged? Maybe it was the Mako. Harry felt light-headed around it, so maybe it was screwing with people's heads and they didn't realize it.

He tried to be more forgiving after making that realization. It wasn't their fault.

It became clear on the second to highest floor that the roof was patrolled by Turks. Turks with mounted rocket launchers, to be more specific; Harry decided the large weapons were there to compensate for something. He turned to Fain once again, the official leader of their group. She pulled a grenade out of her cargo pants, tore the pin out with her teeth, and threw it. It landed on the roof.

There was a yell and then a BOOM!

The building shook but didn't topple like Harry was afraid it would. Fain said,

"Don't be afraid. It was only a little bomb."

He found that to be a fallacy but didn't argue. Some of the windows on the top floor were blown out, dusting them with chips of glass. He shimmied into the nearest embrasure, cutting his hands only marginally on the jagged glass still in the frame. Smoke filled the top floor and the ceiling was completely gone. The pristine white carpet was covered with rubble and debris; the couches were torn from shrapnel and over-turned. Everywhere there were screaming people in varying states of finery. He saw Fain for only a moment before she disappeared into the chaos.

He quickly ducked into a shady alcove so no wandering Turks would spot him. Once safe he spent a few moments looking around for the other members of his team. The boys were nowhere to be found. It was possible they had lost their grip on the building during the explosion and fallen to their death. Fain was presumably doing her damage somewhere else.

He didn't care either way. All he cared about was staying alive and finding some way to convince Sephiroth to go out for coffee with him. Or maybe even dinner.

God, what was wrong with him? He needed to stop focusing on that.

Speak of the devil and he shall appear. Sephiroth came striding out of the smoke, somehow cleaner than the other panicked officials that occasionally came screaming and stumbling past Harry's hiding place to the stairs since the elevator was broken for now.

Sephiroth stood there by the stairs and began directing the evacuation. Harry saw one of the boys (Kevin?) sneak up behind the man, a dagger held high. He opened his mouth to shout a warning but there was no need to. Sephiroth somehow knew he was there and whirled around smoothly to face him. One hand seized the boy's wrist and twisted it around so that he impaled himself on his own weapon. With the other he helped up a young secretary in a pink suit who'd stumbled over a piece of concrete from the ceiling.

The boy fell into a crumpled heap on the floor.

Sephiroth went back to his job. His eyes tracked across the room, checking for anyone else who needed assistance. Eventually they slid over Harry crouched in his shadow and then returned a half-second later. He raised his eyebrows. Harry smiled sheepishly and gave a little wave. He felt like a nerd immediately after and dropped his arm quickly.

Sephiroth actually rolled his eyes at him and gave him a little smile.

The last of the important people were evacuated. Harry saw a helicopter fly off with a very fat man bleeding profusely tied to a stretcher in it. He assumed it was the President and wondered where Fain was. A second helicopter with the rebel bound and gagged between two Turks answered that question.

He was left alone on the roof of the Shinra building with Sephiroth.

Without the roar of the flames (extinguished), the crush of descending rubble (fallen), and the helicopters (departed), it was very quiet. He could hear, distantly, the sounds of sirens and confusion coming from the lower floors and echoing up the staircase.

He tuned it out. Sephiroth wasn't saying anything; he seemed to be at a loss. After a little while Harry walked over to a mostly intact sofa close to the edge and flipped it right-side up. He sat and began to rub his sore legs. Climbing a building the height of the Shinra building was no easy task, and he'd been away from serious exercise for months.

Sephiroth came over and sat next to him, looking out the broken windows at the setting sun. Tonight the pollution made the sky look like it was in flames. Red, orange, yellow, and streaks of pink cloud swirled in a dizzy vista for his viewing pleasure.

"Who are you?" Sephiroth asked without looking at him. His voice was different than Harry was used to. It was quieter and his vowels were more rounded. It didn't sound like he hand-cut every word before expelling them. This time the words just slipped out gently and easily.

"You know who I am. I'm Harry Potter."

Sephiroth snorted, "I know your name. But I don't know who you are. What kind of person explores governments just for fun? You became a janitor in the hellholes of the basement of your own free will, which is very strange, and now there's this…did you set off that bomb?"

"No, but I helped her get up here. Does that count?"

"Yes."

"Oh."

Sephiroth didn't speak for a while longer and the sky began to fade just a little. Harry put his head on the back of the couch and looked up through the skeleton beams of the ceiling. There were some stars shining faintly through the brown sky. He didn't recognize any of the constellations. Somehow that detail made him feel farther from home than he had so far. He hadn't really realized how far from Ron and Hermione and everyone else until then.

"Do you want to come home with me?"

Harry's head came down so fast it was a blur. He gaped at Sephiroth. His grasp of the language was sketchy, but he was pretty sure he was interpreting that correctly. Was he getting propositioned?

"What?" and then he asked himself what he was doing asking questions and added, "Yes. I would love to go home with you."

Sephiroth smiled, "Good. Because if you stay here, the Turks will find you and kill you."

Oh, so it wasn't going home with Sephiroth _like that _but it was close enough. This realization came through only dimly. Harry was too busy memorizing every detail of Sephiroth's dazzling teeth. They were the color of milk and just lovely to look at. He may or may not have sighed dreamily out loud.

Sephiroth's home was in the Military compound at the base of the building, quite a few floors away from their current position. Instead of taking the same stairs as everyone else, Sephiroth showed him a short cut. There was a metal ladder leading straight down into darkness hidden inside a closet that opened when Sephiroth slid his card in the lock.

They climbed down mostly without speaking. Harry was grateful. He didn't want to start chattering away and then say something really stupid in front of Sephiroth. Idly he wondered how old Sephiroth was. He had one of those faces that just didn't show age or youth.

By the halfway point Harry's legs gave out and he almost fell off the ladder. He clung to it with the last of his strength, breathing heavily. Sweat dripped from his forehead into his eyes, stinging them. Before he could explain why he was stopping to Sephiroth, a strong hand grabbed his calf and tugged. His hands, slick with sweat and blood from the glass cuts, slid easily down the rails. He practically fell on top of Sephiroth. Harry let out a hoarse yell, startled; he flailed around and finally grabbed onto the General's shoulders. He found himself in a reverse piggyback.

Sephiroth blinked at him in the dim security light. Harry apologized and prayed that he wasn't blushing.

"Uh…"

"It's okay; I'll carry you."

He began to descend again. Harry held tight wondering if this was what small children felt when they were carried. Harry had no memories of that so he could make no comparisons. Without the strain of climbing to keep him awake, his head began to bob forward. He made an effort but eventually he slumped onto Sephiroth's shoulder.

He smelled like orange zest. That was the last clear thought Harry had before slipping into sleep.

Sephiroth noticed and slid one arm under Harry's thighs to hold him up as he continued to descend. He didn't want Harry to slip out of his arms and fall to a horrible death before he got some answers.

Sephiroth took the back passageways to his quarters, casting Fog to obscure the cameras. The security would be suspicious but no one would suspect him; Sephiroth was the loyal General, the happy slave to Shinra. Why would he do anything against the company that gave him everything he had?

A bitter smile played across his lips as he unlocked his doors. He'd played that role his whole life because there was nothing else for him to do. He needed regular medical attention to make sure no viruses from his childhood spent in the labs were eating his insides, so even if he did leave the company he would still be attached to them. Midgar had the most advanced medical facility on the Planet.

He laid Harry down on his sofa and went into the bathroom for his medical kit. He couldn't heal Harry's hands until he got the glass out.

As he used tweezers to gently remove the slivers of glass, he thought about his future. What else could he do but wage war? And when he wasn't waging war, he planned budgets for wars and trained other people how to fight wars and even thought about the best way to make war. He'd never known anything else.

Well, perhaps he had. He couldn't remember anything before the age of eight, so it was possible that he had done something before then. But it was unlikely. From what he'd inferred from years of listening to Professor Hojo mutter to himself while giving him check-ups, he had spent his early life in the labs.

Harry shuffled in his sleep, rolling onto his side away from Sephiroth. He frowned and manhandled him back over to continue working on his hands only to have Harry curl around him this time.

He smirked a little and finished taking out the last of the glass. He cast a low-level Cure; it should have been just enough to seal the cuts against infection.

An explosion of green light later, Harry was sitting wide awake on his sofa looking oddly rumpled. Where he had been covered in a mixture of oil, sweat, and blood before with a dusting of rubble, he was now spotless. Even his hair was clean. The little splits on his chapped lips were gone as well.

"What the hell?" he spluttered; he sounded like someone had dumped cold water on him.

Sephiroth had nothing to say. He held up the Materia; it was the only explanation he could offer. Harry looked at the Materia, then at Sephiroth.

"What did you do to me?"

"I was trying to seal your cuts. There must be something wrong with this Materia," he held it up to his eye, closing the other so he could squint at it. Harry watched him do this and then took the Materia from him. Warm shocks went up his arms and settled in his chest. A heaviness he hadn't known he was feeling went away, leaving him feeling like he usually felt after a long lazy day spent with his friends.

He couldn't help smiling.

"I don't think there's anything wrong with it," he said, his voice sounding normal now instead of hoarse with exhaustion like before, "I think its just fine."

Sephiroth was staring at him. He didn't stop smiling but asked him what he was looking at.

"You're glowing."

Harry blinked and then looked at his hands. They looked normal. "No I'm not."

"Your eyes, not the rest of you; have they always been that color?"

"What color?" Harry got up, looked around, and went into the open bathroom. He leaned over the sink, looking at himself in the mirror as closely as possible, "I don't know what you're talking about," he called, "My eyes look the same as they always do!"

Sephiroth followed him and looked at his reflection. Harry was right. His eyes were normal again, though the color remained. Harry met his eyes in the mirror and raised his eyebrows. In his stilted interpretation of Midgar speech, he asked,

"Are you feeling okay?"

Sephiroth nodded, "I'm a little tired. Maybe it was a trick of the light. You're clean now, but if you'd like to use the shower you're welcome to it."

Harry smiled, "Thanks. Where do you want me?"

"The sofa; I'll get you a blanket."

Sephiroth had never had a guest besides Lieutenant Fair, and Zack hardly counted as a regular guest. The whole reason he had to camp out on his couch in the first place was because he'd somehow set his own quarters on fire. Whereas having Zack in his home didn't ruffle him in the slightest (Zack was more boisterous than the other members of the military, but Sephiroth found him refreshing instead of irritating. It was nice to see someone so genuinely enthusiastic about everything life had to offer), Harry made him nervous.

He couldn't put his finger on what it was, but something about Harry made him want to know him. He hadn't been close with anyone since Angeal and Genesis, and even then he was more a third wheel to their lifelong friendship than anything else. They became friends through association, not any real desire. He sometimes wondered if he would've spent any time with them if he didn't have to.

Their betrayal was still a surprise, and he held some bitterness against Angeal because of the pain he caused Zack.

Zack was the closest he had to a friend, now that he thought about it.

He handed the spare blanket to Harry, who smiled and thanked him. He said good night and Harry repeated it incorrectly.

He had to smile to himself as he undressed in his room. Tomorrow morning he would figure out Harry. He would find out where he was from, what he wanted, and why he was so hard to stay away from. Okay, maybe not the last one. But he wanted to know anyway. He got into bed and put his hands under his head. He normally had no trouble falling asleep but tonight he was restless. He wondered if Harry would still be there tomorrow and then snorted. There wasn't a chance of Harry making a run for it tonight; only Sephiroth could open or close his door and there were no windows or air vents bigger than a standard postal envelope. His password was over 30 characters long and in gibberish so it was essentially unshakable.

Rolling onto his side, he tried to fall asleep. He ended up doing reports in bed, the boring kind about what SOLDIERS were making progress with spell casting and which were more inclined to chop their enemies into pieces.

~000~

Harry woke up in the middle of the night to the sounds of two people arguing just outside the door. Both voices were male and most likely in their twenties. They used a lot of slang so it was hard for him to understand them. He made an effort.

"Dude, _it is two in the morning._ You know he doesn't get up until 3:45! He won't be happy about this. Let's just skip his room."

"Don't be such a wimp, Kunsel. He's not going to stab us. The orders were to search the entire compound for this guy, and we've already searched almost the entire thing twice. We saved the officer's rooms for last, and now you're chickening out?"

Kunsel's reply was too quiet for Harry to hear. He must have given in to his friend's taunts about cowardice, though, because someone started banging on the door. Sephiroth's bedroom door opened and he strode out in a pair of black sleep trousers and a t-shirt. Harry admired him from his place on the sofa before his protective instincts assembled what he'd overheard the newcomers discussing and realized he was probably the person they were looking for. Just as Sephiroth was opening the door he bolted into the bathroom.

Sephiroth found Zack and his friend Kunsel standing sheepishly on his doorstep.

"What do you want?" he asked, not wasting any time. He'd only just managed to fall asleep when they began knocking and was eager to return to it. He needed to be awake in little less than an hour in order to make patrols. It was more a formality than a real necessity, but the sight of him striding around the compound inspired loyalty in the SOLDIERS and recruits.

"We, uh, we're supposed to search your apartment for an escaped convict."

He stepped to the side. They were looking for Harry, he was sure, but he'd heard Harry slip into the bathroom to hide. Hopefully his guest would be smart enough to find the false back inside his linen cupboard that led to an escape route.

Always be prepared for the worst was his motto.

Zack looked in his kitchen. Kunsel checked his living room, even looking under the couch. Sephiroth was amused to see that they were both reluctant to look in his bedroom and had a brief scuffle about which one of them would have to. Zack won and went into the bathroom while his friend practically tiptoed into Sephiroth's bedroom.

Kunsel didn't find anything. Sephiroth felt his shoulder's stiffen when he realized how long Zack had been in the bathroom. He opened to door and found his lieutenant sniffing his hair conditioner. He guiltily put the bottle behind himself as though that would somehow erase what Sephiroth saw him doing.

"I, uh, oh…shit, please don't kill me!"

Kunsel peeked around him and exclaimed, "What are you doing?"

They argued and Sephiroth took his conditioner back. Why were they interested in his grooming products? He just used a generic brand that smelled a little like oranges. He wore it because new studies showed that the smell of citrus repelled monsters. Were they expecting something more extravagant?

He didn't understand the fascination the public had with his hair. It was just hair. Sure it was long and a little unusual, but so what? Lots of people had unusual hair in this city.

~000~

Harry spent five seconds panicking before he started checking the cupboards for somewhere to hide. He noticed a faint spatial discrepancy in the linen cupboard and investigated it. The wall that was slightly closer than it should have been turned out to be a door just big enough for him to crawl through. Sensors made the passage he found himself in light up.

He was reluctant to leave Sephiroth's cozy little home, which was done up in shades of gray and just small enough without being claustrophobic. But there was nothing for it. For all he knew SOLDIERS had super-smell.

Crawling along, he found himself moving on a steady downward slope. And then he began to slide uncontrollably. He bit his lip to stay quiet as he skidded along at a terrifying velocity.

Then suddenly the slope began to even out again and then some more until he crawled up to a grate. He peered through it and found the troughs of filth that ringed the city. The tunnel led straight to the outer wall of the city. He waited and timed to release of filth so that he wouldn't step out into a shower of sewage. When it was safe, he quickly removed the grate and scrambled out. He hopped over the trough, only getting a little on his pant legs.

He was confronted with what to do with himself. He couldn't go back; that would be tempting fate. Hopefully Sephiroth would figure out where he'd gone and care enough to follow. Chewing his nails, he debated the issue. Should be build a temporary shelter out of the scant scrub that sprouted here and there out of the dried-up and cracked ground, or should he split and hope Sephiroth could track him, if he followed at all?

While he was busy thinking, a helicopter came circling the city. He had nowhere else to go and had to dive into the trench of sewage to avoid getting seen. He shut his eyes and mouth and prayed none of it would go up his nose. The stench was overpowering; he felt light-headed.

Against all odds, the helicopter began to descend. It hovered 20 feet away; he could feel the wind from its blade blowing the slop around in a nightmarish flurry of unmentionable liquids. Something died inside him. This was a low moment.

Strong hands grabbed him. He thrashed wildly and felt someone's nose break. He opened his eyes and kicked one of the men in the crotch. He went down and Harry whirled to face his final attacker. In the light from the helicopter he could see that they weren't SOLDIERS. These were Turks. He managed to smash his shoulder against the Turk's ribs, breaking a few. He made a run for it.

The helicopter followed from the sky. Over the sound of the blades Harry could hear someone shouting,

"Don't shoot him! I want him alive and intact!"

It was a voice that evoked the creeping slime of insects and the cold damp of caves. He shuddered and ran faster. Whoever that guy in the helicopter was, he had no intention of getting caught.

He was grateful to the Cure from earlier; he couldn't have run as far as he did without it. The Turks chasing him had to be replaced with another team from inside the helicopter. He smiled a little and put on a burst of speed. There were piles of rock scattered through the desert, like the remnants of a mountain range. He aimed for one of them and prayed for a cave.

In the darkness of the rocks, he slipped into a crack between two of the boulders. He scrabbled in the sand for a small rock. He found one the size of his fist and hefted it. A Turk crept past his hiding place and paused, looking around. Harry raised his hand, clutching the rock, and smashed it into the back of his head. He dropped to his knees and into a heap. Harry hit him again and heard something crack. His stomach roiled but he refused to feel guilty. It was in self-defense.

The helicopter flew overhead, letting him see who he'd killed. It was the same Turk that interrogated him, the blue-haired one whose name he never caught. Harry quickly moved to a new hiding place out of the light and found another rock, this one not slick with blood.

He knew there were at least three other Turks to contend with. He finished another as she crept right into his hiding place, leaving two.

Slipping from his hiding place, he looked for a cave and found one. Unfortunately one of the Turks was in it, waiting for him. He aimed his gun at Harry. Even though Harry knew he had orders not to shoot him, he'd had enough dealings with hired killers to know that things 'just happened'.

As he was being handcuffed, the Turk whispered, "I don't know what you did to make the Professor so interested in you, but I wouldn't trade places with you for anything in the world. Good luck staying alive."

With that ominous message in his ears, Harry was taken into the helicopter. The other passengers pinched their noses from the stench of him. He felt some small satisfaction at their discomfort.

And then he saw the professor. He was wearing a white lab coat and black trousers. His shoes were old and scuffed as though he had better things to worry about than shoes. The greasy black hair tied loosely into a ponytail reminded him uncomfortably of Snape. He wore glasses that caught the light of the helicopter for a moment before it slid away, revealing eyes so cunning Harry shrank back in his seat.

Whoever this Professor was, he wasn't human inside.

They rode in silence for a long time. Harry knew they weren't going back to Midgar, so he looked out the window and inspected the unfamiliar terrain. They passed from night into morning. The sunrise was just as polluted as the sunset. The clouds were blue and the sky was a sickly white color, like old snow.

Hours went by and Harry felt the need to use the lavatory. He chose to hold it, not wanting to draw any more attention to himself. The Professor was still looking at him, occasionally taking notes on a clipboard he'd produced from thin air.

Sometimes he would mutter to himself though no one could hear what he was saying.

Harry studied the Turk's body language. They were obviously well-trained and hid it well, but it was clear that the Professor made them just as uncomfortable.

They stopped at little city in the middle of a wide field for fuel. Harry was let out to use the facilities, but first he was hosed down. In the background he could see the helicopter being sanitized as well.

A Turk came into the toilet with him and stood awkwardly in a corner of the stall as Harry went about his business. Harry smiled at him just to make him more uncomfortable. To up the ante, he asked,

"So what's your name?"

"John."

Harry snickered, "John Smith?"

The Turk (John) raised his eyebrows, "How the fuck did you know that?"

Harry sobered, "That's your real name?"

"Uh, yeah. What's wrong with my name?"

Harry pulled up his new trousers, which were really just white hospital-grade pajamas. His old clothes had been burned on the city trash heap. He went to wash his hands and answered, "Nothing; I was just surprised."

"Why?" he asked, narrow-eyed.

Harry shrugged, "You wouldn't understand."

"Try me."

Harry kept silent as he walked out into the sunshine. The helicopter was hovering, and he saw that their pilot, a bald man with sunglasses, was eating a sandwich. He'd gotten some mustard on his lip, forming a bright yellow mustache. The sight made him smile despite his circumstances.

Seated once again, the Turk continued to hiss questions at him until the Professor came back. He analyzed everything Harry was fed and made more notes. He asked the Turk about the state of Harry's waste. Harry snickered and the unhappy Turk elbowed him.

After a few more hours of flight Harry saw mountains in the distance. An inexplicable feeling of dread began to pour through his veins like ice water. There was something conscious in those mountains, something beyond human or even monster consciousness. Whatever was in those mountains was the most malignant thing he'd been exposed to since Tom Riddle.

He shuddered.

The helicopter landed about a mile from a small town, their wood houses looking out of place in the bare mountain scenery.

He was escorted out of the helicopter and down a thin rocky trail. They went behind the village and came to a mansion. Harry wondered what kind of person would build a house like this here. Probably someone rich enough to just build houses on a whim, he supposed.

Inches of dust covered everything inside. They bypassed the living room, heading straight upstairs and through the rooms until the Professor opened a closet. Harry saw a second door at the back of it. It was made of metal and seemed incongruous in the ancient wood mansion.

The Professor punched in a code and they descended. He flicked on lights as he went, and Harry saw that they were in a tiny version of the laboratories at Shinra.

Up until then he'd remained faintly optimistic that this was all going to workout somehow. But knowing what the Professor did to the people and creatures back in Midgar and knowing that he was about to become one of his experiments made him slide off his precipice of hope and straight into despair.

There was no way anyone else knew where they were other than the Turks, and people like the Turks didn't disobey their orders.

He was put into a cell just big enough for him to sit down in and the door was shut. He heard it lock.

~000~

End chapter 6


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter 7

The Professor didn't remove him from his cell for several hours. During this time Harry counted the cracks on the concrete walls, urinated in the drain, and caught three spiders. They were friendly and didn't bite him; he manipulated them into weaving webs between his fingers for lack of anything better to do.

He was desperate to distract himself with anything, anything to keep him from thinking too hard about what he was bound to experience as soon as the Professor decided to fetch him.

A Turk came to get him. Harry recognized him as the helicopter pilot, the one with the mustard mustache. Harry smiled at him on reflex. The Turk remained stoic.

As they walked down the hallway, Harry brightly asked, "Say, how did you know where to find me?"

He wasn't expecting him to answer, so he jumped when the Turk replied in the deepest bass he'd ever heard, "Professor Hojo has surveillance cameras in the General's private quarters for observation. When he saw you go into the linen cupboard, he knew you would use the passage to escape to the outer walls."

"Oh," Harry decided to gamble and ask something else in the hopes that he'd get an answer, "Why does he want me? Why not somebody more, I don't know, interesting?"

He chuckled darkly, "Your little Materia display was plenty interesting."

Harry began to curse inside. This was just his luck. Maybe he really had started glowing for a second in addition to the whole full-body cleaning spell part. Thinking about the Materia made him think about Sephiroth. He wondered what Sephiroth was doing right now; was he looking for him? Probably not, he decided.

They'd reached the end of the hall. Harry was ushered into a room so cold he could see his breath. He soon found that it was so cold because a number of refrigerators along the walls were open. Inside them were vials filled primarily with Mako of varying thicknesses and steel cases, presumably containing relics of Professor Hojo's demented interpretation of science.

The bald Turk hoisted him onto a metal gurney and began to strap him down. Harry was reminded of the straps at the mental hospital. He squirmed out of habit and the Turk tightened the straps tight enough to cut off his circulation a little. He glared. The Turk glared back, all earlier friendliness gone. He vanished through the door they'd entered.

Harry was left alone with Hojo.

It was becoming abundantly clear why Fanny had despised him so much. Even the way he breathed was spine-chilling. Harry shivered on his cold table, curious despite himself. What was Hojo going to do to him? It wasn't like cutting him open was going to do any good; though he had a feeling the Professor might do that 'just in case'.

"So, Mr. Potter, do you have any intention of explaining your unusual powers?"

Harry stared at the ceiling. It had a row of circular fluorescent lamps on it, all of them lit and shining bright as suns. He hadn't seen healthy sunlight since his last jaunt to Earth. The entire planet here seemed sickly, pale, and run-down. He was beginning to suspect it had something to do with the Mako. If it really was the lifeblood of the Planet, then reactors around the world pumping it out of its cellars certainly wasn't a good thing.

He didn't answer. What good would it do? 

Because of the angle he was strapped down at, he could only watch Hojo out of the corner of his eye. He watched him take out one of the frosty vials and fill a syringe with it. A lot of people are afraid of needles, most likely from a pathological fear that a needle will somehow end up spearing their eye or vague fears of shots from their early childhood. Harry was afraid of needles because needles meant pain. He was good at handling pain, but he had a feeling that no amount of dark spells practiced on his person could prepare him for that Mako shot.

In the labs he'd overheard the SOLDIERS that came down for check-ups complain about how painful Mako showers were.

The needle was stabbed into his temple, startling him. The strap across his forehead kept him from jerking away and possibly breaking off the tip. He could see the plunger being pressed down, the green liquid disappearing inside of him.

It didn't hurt.

He blinked; he continued waiting on pins and needles for the agony to set in. It didn't come. He frowned; he was almost disappointed. Hojo leaned over him, blocking the light, and mimicked his expression.

"How do you feel?"

"I feel…" Harry had been about to say that he felt fine, but a sudden jolt of what he could only describe as euphoria shot through his entire body, making it jerk as much as possible in its straps. If he'd started floating from the sensation he wouldn't have batted an eye, "…bloody fantastic," he finished in English. He'd momentarily lost the ability to concentrate on speaking in their language.

Hojo leaned out of his sight, and Harry had a psychedelic experience with the lights. They seemed to become loosed from their screws and circle him like satellites. He smiled at them and twitched his fingers, trying to touch them. He couldn't see him, but Hojo had taken a seat on his high stool to take copious notes, looking up at him over his glasses every moment or so.

After a few minutes of floating on an invisible cloud of good feelings, Harry felt himself return somewhat to normal. He felt uncommonly chipper all the same.

"What's next?" he asked with an inappropriate amount of enthusiasm. Hojo's pen scratched as he took down another paragraph of notes. Harry peered around him as much as he was able, straining his eyes to read the labels. The green vials were rated by intensity, he (accurately) guessed.

Hojo didn't answer. He selected another vial; this one was marked with a bigger hieroglyph and was colored a shade darker than the last. He filled a syringe and repeated his previous process. Only this time he stabbed the shot into Harry's stomach instead of his temple. Harry felt the sting and winced. Hojo's teeth flashed.

This time the feeling of euphoria lasted longer, and Harry fancied he could hear someone or something whispering to him towards the end of it.

Hojo continued to stab shots into him periodically. He got excited when Harry's eyes glowed briefly and skipped a few levels of dosage to give him a higher jolt. Harry _knew _he was hearing someone then. He blocked out Hojo and the laboratory and even the cold completely, focusing all of his attention on listening to the voice.

It wasn't addressing him; not at first. At first it only sang softly of cycles, of growing things, and of pain. The voice was the strangest thing he had ever heard. Somehow it was one voice and many simultaneously, both poetic and unrhymed. The most interesting thing about it was that it didn't speak or sing in words. Somehow he understood it even though it didn't speak in the language of this planet or his own.

It must have noticed him listening. He felt something like the brush of a feather against a part of him that had remained untouched since Voldemort's death. His soul quivered at the alien feeling but calmed when only peace and a gentle vibration were forthcoming. He rose out of his body to join the voice. It was like using a muscle he hadn't known he had: both uncomfortable and exhilarating.

All at once the cold metal gurney and leather straps with their sharp buckles were gone. He was lying on his back in a field of flowers that stretched as far as the eye could see. With a shock he recognized them from Aerith's church. Their scent filled the air and attracted little buzzing insects that crept amongst the blooms, pollinating.

Aerith appeared beside him, dressed in a different pink ensemble this time. She smiled and handed him a flower. He took it. He asked no questions. He knew better than to disturb the still softly singing voice.

Aerith's mouth opened and the voice came out of her, in English this time.

"I am very sick, Harry. My children are hurting me without knowing it, and the enemy is poised to attack. In my weakness, she will prevail and win. If she wins, this world will be destroyed. Will you help me?"

Harry did the only thing a person could do after hearing an appeal like that. He nodded.

~000~

_The President is dead. _

That was all the note, taped to his office desk, said. It was on the monogrammed notepaper the President's Chief Secretary, Claire, used. Sephiroth knew he was only permitted to know this because he'd done her enough favors in the past to win her over.

He sighed and tore the note into little pieces. Once they were small enough he popped them into his mouth and swallowed. He could've burned them, but the smoke detectors were on 'panic mode' right now and would go off at the slightest hint of trouble.

This little heads-up allowed him to enter the Vice President's office once summoned with genuine aplomb. Rufus seemed irritated at his composure and phrased the news of his father's death in deliberately shocking words. Sephiroth didn't even blink. He didn't interact with Rufus regularly and that was partially on purpose. He despised politicians. He wasn't too fond, in general, of anyone else prone to strategizing on the same level he did.

"You already knew, didn't you?"

Sephiroth gave this accusation no acknowledgment. Rufus rolled his eyes.

"Whatever. I don't even care anymore. The real reason I wanted to talk to you is because we've got a bit of a crisis on our hands."

Sephiroth raised an eyebrow in silent encouragement to continue. He preferred not to open his mouth at all around any of the other high-ranking Shinra elite. They constantly sued each other over the smallest things and he didn't want to get shoved into the legal game with the rest of them. He had more important things to do with his time.

"Obviously the people are panicking because of the terrorist attack, but I have reassured them that I will take care of everything in a press conference this morning. There is a clear line of succession that makes me the new President, so I've already started preparations for an official ceremony commemorating that. What worries me is that this successful attack will encourage other terrorist groups to try similar strategies. It doesn't help that the woman responsible for my father's death escaped from the Turks, leaving us with no criminal to punish."

Sephiroth had already thought about this the night before after Harry escaped and taken some notes about it. He brought this sheaf of notes from behind his back and handed them to Rufus. Rufus took them, turned them right side up, and began to read.

After a moment of skimming, he looked up and reluctantly said, "Well, it looks like you've thought of everything. You can go."

Sephiroth nodded and left at a swift stride. It wasn't running, but it was pretty close. He preferred Rufus to his father, as Rufus had at least _some _scruples, but he was still a politician.

Last night he was so sure he would get a chance to gently interrogate Harry that he'd become a little too relaxed. He wanted to follow him last night but no one was allowed to leave the compound. He knew better than to violate that rule a third time. The Shinra Corporation punished his infractions with extra visits to the labs.

Now Harry could be anywhere. If he was smart, which he was, he would have camped out in one of the desert caves until things died down. There were plenty of small monsters there that could be caught and eaten, and the temperature didn't require a lot of amenities.

But there was always the possibility that Harry was too unfamiliar with the area to know that the desert provided cover. He may have crawled back through the sewage pipes and hidden out in the little-used passages inside the Plate itself.

He had reports to finish and an inspection to make in an hour. He hesitated and then shoved the reports to the side. Pulling his keyboard onto his lap (it was uncomfortable but he did it to irritate Professor Hojo, who he knew had cameras hidden in his office somewhere), he began to hack into the security feed. It took him five minutes. They'd upped the security since the last time he got caught spying. It wasn't like he saw anything important, only a 'secret meeting' between Scarlet and the President at three in the morning. And even then he saw more than he wanted to. Five seconds of flesh was more than enough, thank you.

He fiddled with the history and managed to get it to start from roughly the time Harry hid in his bathroom. He played all the screens simultaneously and fast-forwarded as fast as he could. One of the mysteries about him was that he could actually see and comprehend all of that at once.

It took an hour, and he didn't see a single glimpse of Harry. He tried the sparse surveillance under the Plate. Again, nothing. He hacked into every camera he could find a signal for and still came up with nothing but panicked or gossiping natives reacting to the terrorist attack. He did catch some feed of a Junior Turk buying some illegal mind-altering pills in the slums. He saved that part, smirking. Any dirt on the Turks he could get recorded proof of was saved in a very secure folder for later revelation should he need a favor.

He was stumped until he thought of the regularly spaced cameras that filmed the outer walls. Tapping into those, he located the one that surveyed the other end of his secret exit tunnel.

Sure enough, Harry crawled out. He smiled at this until he watched the rest of the tape. He recorded the number of the helicopter and found their feed. Harry's evasive skills were impressive, as was the fact that he managed to kill any Turks at all, much less _three of them. _

Harry was just getting more interesting every day in the best possible way.

There were no records, as was typical, of the Turk mission. The helicopters had been erased from the company's inventory as though they'd never been there. Sephiroth was left with no idea where they were going or what they would do there. He had a feeling it had something to do with Harry's abnormalities.

But no one knew where Hojo's secret labs were. It was rumored that he had at least one on every continent, but Sephiroth privately believed that to be impossible; there weren't enough people with the intellectual level required to manage one that were also as twisted as Hojo.

He put his head in his hands and gave himself a minute to calm down. It wasn't the end of the world. Harry was tough. He'd be fine. Sephiroth hoped.

There was a knock on his door. He jolted out of his private thoughts, smoothed a hand through his hair, and called, "Enter!" he'd discovered that using a single-word command helped relations with the non-SOLDIER soldiers, though only the Planet knew why.

The young corporal responsible for delivering mission assignments stepped inside. He saluted with his usual precision and laid a yellow folder on his desk. He waited for Sephiroth to dismiss him before saluting again and exiting. Sephiroth listened to the door 'click' closed and then opened the packet.

It was a mission to the Nibelheim [Mountain terrain] Reactor, to inspect some large and abnormal monster activity reported as ongoing and damaging over the past three months. Reading the details, he sighed when he found that the reports had been ignored until a dragon got involved. When would the rest of this bureaucracy learn that the best way to deal with a problem no matter how small or insignificant was to solve it immediately?

He pressed the buzzer labeled 'Fair' on his desk. Seconds later Zack entered without knocking. He saluted sloppily and sat on the metal chair in front of Sephiroth's desk. Passing him the folder, Sephiroth delivered his instructions about selecting two recruits to accompany them and which driver to transport them. You had to pick them with care; half were road-raging bastards and the other half were alcoholics. Depending on the terrain, you picked whichever was the least dangerous.

Once Zack left, Sephiroth dashed off some very quick reports in the remaining time he had before the inspection. He clicked off his pen just as his computer reminded him of the time. He pulled on his shoulder armor, strapped on his sword, and shut down his office for the week. Hopefully he wouldn't be gone that long killing monsters, but surprises happened.

He strode down the halls to the training rooms. Head held high, he made eye contact with every recruit as he walked down the line. He pointed out two that were using performance-enhancing drugs to the aide that followed him and another that had raped a classmate the evening previous. Weeds plucked from his crop of troops, he gave them a salute. As one they copied him; hero-worship shone brighter than the Mako that would eventually replace it in their eyes.

An overnight bag, pre-packed with the essentials, was waiting on the top shelf of his small closet. He took it down and did a swift inventory of its contents. Better safe than sorry. Satisfied that everything was in order, he went to his kitchen and dumped everything inside it into his trash bag. Overnight bag in one hand and trash in the other, he locked his quarters with a bump of his nose and headed down the hall to the hanger. On the way he passed the garbage drop-off chute. He disposed of his garbage.

Mournfully he remembered that there were some sweets in there he'd been meaning to eat that night.

Zack was already in the hanger waiting for him. Shinra was too stingy to pay for separate warehouses for their helicopters and trucks, so the trucks were kept crammed against the walls to give the helicopters more maneuverability in the center.

Sephiroth passed the same Junior Turk he'd seen buying drugs last night sitting in one of the helicopters repairing a light. He gave him a smirk and got a confused smile in return.

He took one look at the driver Zack chose and shook his head. Zack whispered to him that he was the only one available. They had no choice; it was either have the one driver that combined both sides of the equation. Even now the man lifted a bottle of strong slum liquor to his lips and took a gulp. When he fumbled with the cap, he cursed every man who'd participated in the brewing and bottling of his beverage.

Technically the mission didn't have a high enough budget allotment to afford a helicopter, but Sephiroth wasn't above digging into his private funds to avoid unpleasantness. They were going to take a helicopter or he wasn't going.

Besides, the helicopter would get them there much faster than a truck. The sooner they got this mission over with, the sooner Sephiroth could implement his plan to scour the globe for Hojo and Harry.

~000~

Harry ended his communication with the Planet with a gasp. After being free from it for over an hour, his body felt tight and restrictive. He took some deep breaths, blinking rapidly. For a terrifying moment he was sure his eyes didn't work anymore until the corrective spell kicked in.

Hojo was standing very close to him, excitedly writing stuff down on his notepad. Harry expelled the stale air from his lungs in a great whoosh, startling the Professor into dropping his pen. He gave him a smile. Hojo leaned down and pried his eyes open as wide as they would go in their sockets, shining a light on them.

"I presumed you were unconscious, Mr. Potter. I did not expect you back so soon. Tell me: how are you feeling?"

Harry feigned pain, "I feel like I had too much to drink and like there is a great weight on my chest. It hurts to breathe." 

"Hmm…" Hojo jotted down some things and then a diabolical gleam came into his eyes, "That's only a side effect of first exposure to Mako. You're a very lucky young man, Mr. Potter. Your reactions to the tests I performed have convinced me that you are worthy of being injected with something a little more interesting. I'm going to introduce you to someone very dear to my heart."

He went to the refrigerators, most of which were closed now, presumably because the Mako testing was over. It was one of the silver cases that he removed this time. Harry watched as much as he could, twice as wary now as he was before. Before all he had were suspicions and some obvious conclusions about the man's methods and madness. But his session with the Planet had revealed particulars to him that made him wonder if he was going to make it through this experience with his mind intact. He knew the corners of his sanity were a little raggedy. That fact was a highly classified side effect of the Second War, and the only person outside of the Order and his private physician that knew was Luna Lovegood. And even then he was fairly certain that she didn't count. Luna naturally knew everything about everyone, just like Dumbledore had.

Hojo held up his latest syringe and inspected it for damage. Satisfied, he prepared the tube.

The liquid inside was green like the others, but there was something…off about it. It was thick and syrupy and left grease stains on the sides of the vial as it sloshed around by itself. Hojo had a surgeon's hands (still as stone) and yet the liquid squirmed and slimed around in its glass prison. Harry's stomach turned at the thought of that malignant thing going inside him.

Hojo talked as he prepared Harry's arm. He did this properly with swabs of alcohol and everything. Presumably this fluid required more careful injection.

"I found her quite by accident, you know. She was up in the Northern Crater, all cold and alone, the poor thing. That idiot I was working with wanted to put her in a museum, but I knew better. She wasn't meant to sit in a protected cage to be gawked at by the ignorant masses. She was meant to be used, to be spread. And spread her I have."

Harry understood enough of his speech to feel disgusted.

"Tell me, do you think its Mako that makes the SOLDIERS so hard to kill? No; all Mako does is make them strong and healthy; it gives their eyes that sparkle. But Jenova is what makes them sing."

He inserted the needle and pushed down the plunger. Harry shut his eyes but he could feel the pressure of that fluid entering his body, waging war against his blood for space in his veins. It was several tense seconds before he heard a rather different voice purr in his ear. He fancied he could feel her wrapping her tentacles around his grey matter, flexing them possessively.

_She sucked the knowledge out of him so that when she spoke, she spoke in his language._

"_Hello precious."_

_He sat naked on a cloud of darkness. All around him were stars. Beneath him was the abyss. From the abyss came a phosphorescent glow, somewhere between green and yellow. He watched it come closer until a creature stood before him on the clouds. She had the head and shoulders of a woman, and a woman's breasts. They were distended and hung like empty sacks against her slimy stomach. Immediately beneath her breasts the monster began. Tentacles numbering more than eight, more than twelve, curled beneath her. They emitted the glow. Wings made from metal were strapped to her shoulders, their stiff feathers as sharp as knives. _

"_My, my, I thought this day would never come. I thought I was the only traveler in these stars. My gods said I was the only one. That's why I was charged with my mission..."_

"…_the mission to destroy every world possible for their glory?" Harry finished for her, "I am hardly like you, Jenova."_

_She laughed and extended a tentacle. Inside of it, inside each sucker, was embedded a tiny piece of jade. With the curled tip she touched his ring. It flashed at her touch and a bright spark burnt the end of her limb. It huddled behind her like a frightened child. For a moment her beautiful face, and it was very beautiful indeed, twisted with unimaginable fury. But she regained control of herself and continued in her syrupy voice,_

"_I think we have more in common than you'd think, Harry. Tell me who your god is."_

"_I have no god."_

"_Then you are your own god?"  
_

_He shook his head, "No. My world has many gods, most of them dead now. I just don't have a formal relationship with any of them to the point of being able to consider them 'mine'."_

_She seemed stumped by this. Out loud she said, "How…strange. Let's speak of other matters. I want to accept you as my child. Will you have me as your mother? If you join me, you get a share of the immortality the gods granted me to complete my mission."_

_Harry smiled sadly, "I don't want immortality. That's the thing I want the least. But thanks."_

_The anger came back, and this time she didn't restrain it. Her tentacles tightened around his brain, squeezing until he felt like he'd shatter. Memories of his childhood doing chores and getting beat up slipped away, down into the abyss. He had double vision. One saw them standing on the clouds amid the stars. The other was of her wrapped around his entire body now, trying with all her might to break him. _

_The ragged edge of his soul flapped in the cold breeze of oblivion. He'd never felt more tempted to sink into its chilly embrace before; anything to get away from the pain. Physical pain was one thing. It was a reaction of nerves against perceived stimuli, whether real or imagined. _

_This pain went beyond nerves, beyond his brain. His soul thrashed in her grip. Her suckers were poison and they discharged despair and evil emotions of every kind into his psyche. He could feel repressed memories surge to the surface and swarm over him like a cloud of insects. He saw his parents, Sirius, and finally Dumbledore die. Their deaths were magnified into the most horrible detail. _

_Throughout all of this Jenova coddled and bargained. He gritted his teeth and tried to focus on his promise to the Planet._

~000~

In the laboratory, Professor Hojo took a small book's worth of notes just from observing the Potter specimen. He appeared to be wrestling something and had already broken two sets of straps. The Turks stood ready with additional sets, prepared to replace the current set. He'd also broken his leg by smashing it against the side of the table in an effort to roll off the gurney onto the floor.

And the sounds! Hojo had never in his entire career heard such extraordinary sounds. It was like a scream and a hiss and the low keening of a dying animal.

He wrote that down and grinned when Mr. Potter snapped the strap across his forehead yet again by jerked his head up, howling like a wolf. The sound was inhumanely loud and echoed for a solid minute after he went back to his shrieks. Some thin glass vials containing saline fluid burst as his screams became silent.

And then Mr. Potter went limp.

Hojo frowned and then had the Turk trained to assist him bring him a set of surgeon's tools. He went into the disinfecting closet and readied himself to graft a piece of Jenova onto Mr. Potter. Somehow he knew that it was the right thing to do.

When he emerged, the room had been sanitized. Only two Turks remained, both in plastic protective suits over their navy uniforms. The larger one was there to make sure that Mr. Potter didn't get away through extenuating circumstances and the other was his assistant. He opened the largest freezer reverently and took out a box the size of his arm. Inside it was some skin and a rib from Jenova.

He put on his rubber gloves and opened the clasps.

~000~

_And suddenly, amidst the agony, he saw a thin thread. Following it with his fever-red eyes, he saw that it led to the alien's mind. He gripped it lightly and slithered down its length, suddenly tiny as an atom, into her consciousness._

_All was chaos inside her. Emotions roiled with strategies to destroy and memories of past victories. He danced through these and tried to sort them. It gave him something to think about besides the pain. From the agony still racing over his body like lightening gone mad, she hadn't noticed his distraction. _

_Sifting through her thoughts, he caught a glimpse of silver hair. _

_It was Sephiroth. She was inside him; she'd been there since before he left his mother's womb, waiting quietly for him to come to her so she could conquer his will. She knew he would be fragile and emotionally dependent: Hojo's insistence on a loveless childhood had seen to that. _

_And it was so obvious now. Hojo hadn't thought for himself since that day they found her in the Crater. The first man, Professor Gast, was too deeply in love to succumb to her whisperings. He didn't even notice. He was impossible to overcome with his feelings so firmly wrapped around another person's well being. But Hojo had grown up cold inside. His mother hadn't loved him, had even hated him, because he looked like his father. _

_She spread through Hojo like the virus she was, using him as a pawn to plant herself like seeds in the minds of hundreds of strong young men. After her first humiliating foray into this world, this was a glorious victory in the making. Now all she had to do was wait for Sephiroth to come to her. Once he had, everything else would fall into place. If he was hers, she could get him to consume her and then she could use his body like a puppet to activate all the others. _

_All those men, respected and admired, would become her army of death. When they were done, they would happily slay themselves for the promise of immortality in the stars with her. _

_It was a perfect plan, and it was already well on its way to fruition. Harry saw in her mind's eye that she had already had Hojo fabricate a mission to the Nibelheim reactor, where her body rested. Within a matter of days, this plan would be realized._

_Protective rage for Sephiroth and fury at her heartlessness towards the trillions of lives she'd ended throughout her career surged through him like a tide of powerful sanity. Harry found the strength to overcome her then. She didn't understand how he was fighting back at first, but he took the picture of them in the clouds and used it to aim. He took hold of either side of her head and ripped-_

_It separated from her shoulders with a squelching sound. The starry sky vanished and the light went out of her jade. _

~000~

It was the next day, and Harry stumbled upon consciousness almost by accident.

His entire body felt wrecked and beaten, as though a Hippogriff had mauled him and then a set of clumsy house elves sewed him back together. His mouth was so dry he fancied he tasted sand. Inside their sockets his eyeballs felt foreign. Even in extreme pain and discomfort, one thought stood stark in the middle of his mind like a streak of white on a black background.

He had to kill Jenova.

He wasn't stupid enough to think that the specter in his mind was the extent of her consciousness. Her physical body, the location of which he knew to be less than five miles from his current location, needed to be burned. The Planet said that only by turning her to ash would she be finally removed from the life stream.

Opening his eyes, he saw three faces leaning over him. One was the bald Turk, another was a skinny guy with a nose piercing, and the last was professor Hojo.

He opened his mouth and no sound came out. Agony flared along his vocal cords and he tasted blood. He hadn't felt that since two Death Eaters cast Crucio on him at the same time and he screamed for almost ten minutes straight. The blood whetted his tongue. He croaked,

"What happened?"

Instead of answering his question, Hojo whispered with an expression of awe on his face, "Your body rejected the graft _and _the fluid."

"Huh?"

He looked down at himself and winced. The left side of his torso was a bloody mess, as though a monster had sunk its teeth into him and torn away his skin. "What did you do to me?"

"What did I do? I _tried _to give you a skin graft and your body ate it!"

"What?"

Why was no one making sense?

Hojo actually started to stammer with confusion, so Harry turned to the bald Turk. With a patient look on his face like he'd adopt for dealing with a small child, he gently asked, "Could you explain to me what happened? And could you," he looked at the other Turk, "get me some water please? I'm parched."

The skinny Turk obeyed, probably more out of shock at being told what to do than Harry actually having the right to ask for water. He dribbled it into Harry's mouth drop by drop so he wouldn't choke.

The bald Turk began to explain that Harry had wrestled with himself for a few hours, breaking several bones (now Cured) in the process while screaming. This was followed by an hour of being completely limp. He then jerked his arms as though tearing something and vomited up the Jenova injection.

This last event occurred while Hojo was grafting some of Jenova's skin onto his torso to see how his body adapted. The plan was to replace one of his ribs with one of hers in the hopes that further Jenova injections would make his entire bone structure begin to copy the foreign rib. When the fluid left his mouth, his flesh had somehow…absorbed the Jenova graft.

A blood test showed zero residue from the alien remaining in his body, which was what had sent Hojo into a functioning state of shock.

Harry had the feeling that the bald Turk wasn't naturally talkative and therefore used words sparingly, if his short concise sentences were anything to do by. He explained in 30 seconds what would have taken most other people an hour of fumbling and diagrams. Harry could only nod when he finished.

The only explanation he could think of was that the Mako in his body had devoured the alien and relegated her to the life stream to be filtered out through coal or perhaps gasoline. He would have to ask so that he could make sure he burned it later after he burned the main body. He wasn't taking any chances, not when Sephiroth was involved.

Under normal circumstances a Planet in distress would have his hero meter going crazy, so the added stress of his love interest had sent him into what can only be described as hyper mode. For the first time since coming here, he felt his magic swell inside him like an inflating balloon. He turned his eyes to Hojo. He could only hope his magic didn't target the bald Turk; he kind of liked him.

His magic released a spurt of its gathered power without warning and Hojo went flying. Every piece of glass in the room, even Hojo's glasses, exploded into pieces so fine they resembled glittery dust. From the Professor's howls, the dust had gotten into his eyes. He knew it wouldn't leave. It was likely the Professor would never see again, not that Harry was sorry about this.

Another flicker and the Mako dripping out of the refrigerators from the broken vials coalesced into a single stream. It converged on the Professor and began to soak through his skin like he was made of cloth and not flesh. Harry closed his eyes when he turned green and began to swell like a toad.

The skinny Turk bolted, the door slamming loudly shut behind him in the otherwise quiet room. There was a beat of perfect silence, and then Hojo splattered across the walls in a display not unlike modern performance art. Harry was miraculously untouched by the bits of soggy human.

The bald Turk looked at him when he opened his eyes. He hadn't been spared the deluge, but he looked as calm as ever. He began to methodically undo Harry's straps. Before Harry could sit up, he cast a Cure on his raw skin. Harry actually felt it knit back together. It was a bizarre sensation.

He was carried out of the horrible little room and into the claustrophobic hall outside. The Turk carried him into a shower room and left him on the floor while he hosed the human matter and glass off of himself. Harry saw him use a red Materia to burn his clothes and began plotting to steal/borrow it to use on Jenova.

"I'm Rude, by the way." 

"Hm?" Harry looked up from the puddle he was playing with. Rude pointed at himself.

"My name is Rude."

"Oh. You already know who I am."

"Yes."

Rude didn't say anything else. Once cleaned to his satisfaction, he broke into a cupboard against the wall containing towels and white scrubs. Rude had found a pair of sunglasses from somewhere. He dressed himself in the scrubs and then came over with a set for Harry. Harry realized suddenly that he was naked.

That had somehow escaped his notice before. He flushed as Rude helped him dry himself off and then dressed him like you would a child. Harry was grateful, though. Magic swelling inside him or not, his body was still very weak from his apparently exciting evening.

Rude carried him on his back up the stairs and through the house. It was cold outside with a bitter Northern wind that pulled at his hair and clothes and made his eyes stream. Out of gratitude to Rude and also for self-preservation, he expended some of his magic into a warming bubble. Rude jumped and looked around with suspicion and just a little bit of wonder.

"Sorry," Harry murmured.

Rude didn't answer. He seemed to be looking for something. Finally he spotted it, whatever it was, and took his gun out of his pocket. He aimed at something Harry couldn't see and fired. There was a shriek and then the skinny Turk fell out of the bushes, clutching his red chest.

"No witnesses," Rude explained curtly, "Also, he was annoying."

"Oh."

Harry decided right then and there to try extremely hard to not be annoying in any way.

They began to walk towards the helicopter. Rude assassinated one other Turk before getting inside the machine. He strapped Harry into the co-pilot seat because Harry's hands had stopped working. Harry smiled at him.

"Why are you taking care of me?"

"Because I have nothing else to do; now, where do you need to go?"

"The reactor."

"The one here?"

Harry nodded, "It's very important."

As soon as he said this, a helicopter flew over theirs and around the side of the mountain. It was headed for the reactor as well. Rude looked at him with surprise. Harry shrugged, "Don't look at me. I don't know who that was."

~000~

Inside the other helicopter, Sephiroth scanned the mountains for evidence of large monsters. He spotted three likely dragon dens and a flattened patch of trees that couldn't be man-made. He made note of their locations in his folder for the mission.

He glanced towards the pilot and saw that he was still chatting happily with Zack about someone named Aerith. Apparently Zack was dating this Aerith person.

He glanced to the side and saw the one recruit they brought with them. There were two, but the other one got food poisoning from a bad ration packet and had to be dropped off at a hospital on the way. Now there was only the boy Zack selected because he was local. He had his helmet on, but Sephiroth could tell the boy was watching him back even though he wasn't facing him.

The mission folder Zack assembled had a picture of him. He looked at it out of the corner of his eye. Blond hair, blue eyes, and a little on the short side. His first name was Cloud. How cute.

Their helicopter began to descend in preparation for landing. They were close to the Reactor now.

Sephiroth felt something stir in the back of his mind; it was like something long buried began to awaken. And over the sound of the revolving blades of the helicopter, he could swear he heard someone or something whispering. He turned to Cloud Strife and asked if he'd said something.

The boy shook his head. Sephiroth frowned and looked out the window.

~000~

End chapter 7

I am going out of town Thursday and won't be back until early January. I may or may not have time to finish this before I leave. Sorry if I end up leaving you hanging!


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter 8

The reactor was unimpressive outside of some broken pipes and the multitude of monster tracks surrounding it. A pine tree was bent over with bite marks where the trunk snapped. Sephiroth wrote a note on his paper; privately he wondered if he was dealing with a giant woodchuck. He smiled to himself. Zack glanced at him with raised eyebrows and Sephiroth waved his hand. He wasn't in the mood to share the joke.

They performed a standard-procedure survey of the area. Only three monsters attacked them and were killed with only minimal effort. Sephiroth was unimpressed with their size relative to others of their species. They were maybe a fraction larger than usual, but not massively so. He wrote down an angry note about false intelligence on his mission report outline. He'd found that writing the report as he went was more effective than trying to remember everything afterwards. This way he at least had a clear outline of events.

Cloud fell and hurt his leg. Sephiroth had to shake away a buzzing in his temples to concentrate on Curing him, and even then it was difficult to summon the magic. He had Zack try the Materia to see if it was defective, but Zack had no trouble casting the entire range of spells. They shrugged it off as a fluke and headed up to the entrance point.

Sephiroth couldn't shake off the buzzing sound, though. It had been so subtle that he hadn't noticed it until he really tried to think instead of acting on auto-pilot. What was going on? Maybe he needed to get some more sleep these days if he was hearing things. He'd never had a problem with his sleep schedule before, though. He was only 25 years old; wasn't it a little early for his sleep schedule to change?

He pondered this in the back of his mind as he punched in the correct security code. There was a concrete room with three doors inside. One door led to the little office that was built in every reactor in case it was selected for a project that required anything more complicated than the status quo. Another led to the communal showers for anyone touched by Mako with an attached toilet. The last led to a metal staircase that would lead them into the reactor itself.

Zack darted into the toilet and then returned after he'd emptied his bladder.

During the moments Sephiroth was alone with Cloud, he heard the buzzing get louder. Now that he could hear it better he noticed little hissing breaths in it, like someone was whispering too quiet to comprehend actual words. He felt his stomach grow cold with fear. Hearing voices was never a good sign. He would definitely have to see the military shrink later to discuss this problem and rectify it ASAP. He was the General, a military commander. He couldn't afford to lose his mind. Too many people depended on him. Besides, the very thought of the media furor that would result gave him a tension headache.

The reactor was hot and the air was close and stuffy (which did not help his headache). The ventilation in reactors was never very good, partially because air vents cost more money and partially because they were rarely entered by humans other than maintenance workers. There was nothing but the sound of their breathing and the faint sounds of machinery.

In the quiet, the little hissing whisperings developed into a full voice.

Sephiroth continued to walk mechanically up the metal stairs, but his mind was far away.

~000~

Harry's knee bounced impatiently as the helicopter made its way to the reactor. The other visitors had taken the usual landing pad, which was not large enough for two helicopters (why would it be?), so they had to circle the area until they found a clearing about a mile away large enough for them to land.

Rude asked him how he was feeling. It was normal for people to feel odd or at least shaky for up to a week after their first Mako exposure. Harry only felt on edge and physically weak. Rude shrugged when he answered this way and got out of the helicopter. He helped Harry out and walked close to Harry towards the reactor.

Harry weaved and stumbled a few times but managed to walk alone for the most part. Rude carried him through anything complicated without being asked. This gesture made Harry's budding respect for him grow further. For a Turk, Rude was an awfully nice person. That or he had plans to seduce him and was laying the groundwork right now. Harry had once collaborated with a foreign operative on a mission in Romania and thought that his co-worker was only being friendly until the poor man proposed in the middle of a routine meal break.

A single monster dared to cross their path. Rude shot it in the head at the same time Harry fired a blasting curse. The magic in his chest had swelled to the point of becoming physically painful to keep inside. He breathed a huge sigh of relief when the curse released just enough for his lungs to have room to properly expand.

Bits of monster were scattered all over the surrounding trees thanks to Harry.

The reactor was a gray eyesore in otherwise spectacular forest scenery. Vaguely dome-shaped, it emitted foul-smelling smoke into the clear mountain air through pipes mounted against its rear side. There were three sets of human tracks around the perimeter, which Rude insisted on checking. He muttered something about Shinra protocol.

Harry just let him do what he wanted. He still remembered what Rude did to the skinny Turk that annoyed him.

Alone on the front steps of the reactor, he breathed in the combined smell of pollution and Mako. The vinegary scent made him remember the Planet's pleas and explanations. The thought of how much the reactor was hurting the ground his feet rested on made his natural savior urges vibrate with need in his psyche. He gritted his teeth and forced himself to hold still and wait for Rude. What he wanted more than anything was to rush in there right this moment and shut this thing down. After burning Jenova, of course; one must maintain priorities.

He relaxed and opened his mind to make absolutely sure this was the right location. Sure enough, there she was. She wasn't paying attention to him, though. He frowned and felt around for who she was fixated on. A flash of unnaturally-slitted green eyes and long silver hair answered that question.

He stumbled to his feet and dashed inside, all thoughts of waiting for Rude gone now. He didn't have a minute to wait. Every second mattered now.

There were three doors. In true Harry fashion, he opened two dead ends before finding the one that led him inside the reactor. He began to sweat as he panted his way up the stairs. His thighs were burning by the time he made it to the top and sweat dripped down his back, turning some parts of his white scrubs transparent. His bare feet ached from pounding against the metal grating that made up the floor.

The tableau that awaited him at the top of the staircase was enough to give him strength again and drive all those petty concerns out of his mind.

Glass cases filled with human specimens horribly deformed, no doubt by the deceased Professor, took secondary importance to the figures wrestling on the upper level of the staircase. The stairs split off in two directions that circled the Mako pit with another flight of steps just behind him leading to a mirror of the lower plan.

Sephiroth had both hands wrapped around someone's throat. On the stairs leading up to them was the body of what looked like a teenaged boy. His helmet was off and his flax-colored hair spilled around his head like sunshine. Harry stepped over him after checking to see that he was still alive and kept climbing.

He saw the man in Sephiroth's grip go limp. Sephiroth dropped him without care and turned to something in a metal tube behind him. Harry moved as fast as he could, but no amount of adrenaline could make him run in his condition. He wondered if he would have to crawl the last few feet.

When he was ten feet away, he could see what was inside the tube. There was a narrow glass panel across the front of it containing a familiar alien. Her wings were clipped short to her shoulders and some of her tentacles were gone, but she was otherwise unchanged. Harry felt satisfied at the sight of her missing limbs; she deserved any pain the process may have given her.

Sephiroth showed no indication that he knew Harry was there. He didn't turn around, and Harry couldn't see his face in the reflection of the glass. All he could see were two faintly-glowing spots where his eyes should have been. The sight filled him with dread. Was he already too late?

"Sephiroth? Can you hear me?"

Sephiroth didn't answer. He began fiddling with the controls on the side of the tube, his long fingers making quick work of the code pad. The fluid inside began to drain. Harry hesitated. He had assumed he could just come in here and burn the big bad alien into bits without too many problems. But now he had to wonder if Sephiroth would strangle him too if he got too close and whether or not killing her body would do any good when she was obviously inside Sephiroth's mind.

Finally he decided to just go for it. He tackled Sephiroth. The General went down easily, his body a limp puppet in Jenova's hands. Harry disentangled himself from the General and aimed his magic at the tube. Just as sparks began to streak through its exposed wiring, Sephiroth grabbed his ankle and jerked. Harry fell to his knees with a sharp cry.

His kneecaps shattered from the impact with the metal platform.

Curled into a ball, he saw Sephiroth get to his feet as though nothing had happened. All the fluid was gone now. He pressed a button and pushed a lever down. There was a 'clank' and then the glass panel slid open. A smell like the rotting of a colossal sea monster filled the air. It was part decaying flesh, part death, and part salt.

Harry gagged.

Sephiroth reached inside the tube. Harry knew that if he touched Jenova, she would begin to graft herself onto his skin. Harry couldn't let that happen. He crawled to Sephiroth and pushed him over by grabbing the backs of his knees and pressing his legs together. Sephiroth's hand grazed Jenova as he fell. Harry watched in despair as the slime on his fingers sank into his skin like it belonged there.

Sephiroth's eyes glowed but they were dull behind it. His pupils were so narrow Harry could barely see them. He felt his throat close up as he choked back emotion. Now was not the time to be giving up no matter how bad this looked. He grabbed Sephiroth's hand and, after a moment of questioning his sanity, he bit off his fingertips.

The tendons were hard to tear and he had to jerk his head sharply to one side to get them to break them completely. They tasted like poison in his mouth, not flesh. He spat them out and incinerated them with a flick of his eyelashes. His body felt like a limp noodle right now but his magic was still spinning like a tornado in his chest.

Even with the fingers gone, Sephiroth continued to lie there, looking more like a doll than a man. Without his charisma, he became only a strangely-attractive body instead of the compelling individual that had drawn Harry from across the universe like a fish on the line.

Harry forced himself to roll over, with considerable pain, to face the alien. Her eyes were closed but he could feel her watching him. He could feel her fear. It made him hungrier for her destruction. He bared his teeth and let his magic surge out of him in a flash of power bright enough to blind him. It flashed and flamed around her tube before slithering inside like a live thing. It licked at her greasy flesh and then the burning began. Her skin dissolved like butter, too fast to be human.

He watched her metal wings melt.

In the far reaches of his mind he could hear her screaming. She screamed on and on, insults and arguments and pleas in every language ever spoken. She finally subsided into incoherent agony and then into silence. The fire lingered long after she'd turned to a puddle, licking her remains until they evaporated or turned to ashes.

The flames began to spread over the tubes and Harry realized he hadn't told the fire when to stop burning. He only told it to burn. An idea occurred to him. He flexed out his command and felt the fire acknowledge him.

It would burn the entire reactor to the ground, but in such a way as to break the machinery into returning the Mako back into the ground where it belonged. Simply destroying the reactor and leaving a small lake of Mako on the surface of the Planet wasn't going to help her recover her lost strength.

This command in place, Harry turned his attention to his injuries. His jaw ached from his gruesome act of desperation and his knees were in agony. He knew there was no way he could walk out of here.

The SOLDIER, as his uniform denoted him, stirred. Harry thought he was dead. Surviving Sephiroth's strangling didn't seem like a likely event. The SOLDIER sat up and looked around with confusion. His eyes lighted on Harry, then on Sephiroth's prone body. Harry had a coughing fit that made him feel like his insides wanted to be on his outsides. He coughed hard enough to shake violently and some flecks of blood and spittle landed on the hand he used to cover his mouth.

The man frowned at him with concern. Then he noticed the fire licking down the metal rails towards them. He leapt to his feet.

"Shit! We gotta get out of here!"

Harry wanted to say something sarcastic about preferring to burn alive but he was in no position to be sassy. He couldn't walk.

He pointed at his bright red knees. The SOLDIER wordlessly took out a Materia and cast a cure. The injuries and the stains caused by them disappeared along with the sweat that clung stickily to his forehead and back. He gave him a grateful smile and crawled to his feet. The Cure had cured some of the stiffness but he was still fragile. He needed to not move for at least a day for his muscles to fully recover.

They made to lift Sephiroth. Presumably they would carry him down the steps by supporting him with their shoulders. Suddenly his eyes snapped open. The SOLDIER seemed wary and Harry tensed. Sephiroth's pupils were still tiny, though they were a little bigger now than they had been when Jenova was in control.

The SOLDIER murmured something comforting to him. They began to walk, but the SOLDIER tripped on his untied shoelace, bringing down both of them with his weight. The flames had eaten apart the railing beside them. There was a terrifying second when Harry knew exactly what was about to happen, and then Sephiroth's body toppled over the edge.

Harry howled with fright and threw himself on the ground, flinging his arms over the edge. He grabbed Sephiroth by his hair. His arms were torn from their sockets and he felt the sting of tears leap into his eyes. Sephiroth's hair was slippery and he began to lose his grip. The SOLDIER was beside him now and he reached down to grab the hair closer to the roots. He hoisted, caught hold of the underside of Sephiroth's chin, and then the straps crisscrossing his chest.

He grunted as he pulled his commander back onto the bridge. Harry couldn't move, emotional and physical shock combining to make him immobile. He could hear the SOLDIER cursing and wished he could snap out of it. There was no way the SOLDIER would choose to save him and not Sephiroth, and Harry couldn't blame him. Even if Sephiroth wasn't the General of the Shinra army, he still thought his life was worth more than his own. Besides, Harry had had plenty of life, though most of it was spent trying to avoid plenty of death.

He smirked.

Then an arm snaked under his stomach and he was hoisted onto someone's shoulder. Hanging down like a bag of potatoes, he saw that Sephiroth was on his other shoulder. His eyebrows went up. This SOLDIER was obviously the heroic type.

They were moving pretty fast, but the near-loss of Sephiroth had given the flames a lot of time to do their task. The reactor was almost completely destroyed when they burst into the fresh air. Harry was unceremoniously dumped at the foot of a tree beside the blonde teenager from before. Rude swam into his hazy view and started casting spells on his destroyed arms. He whimpered, too weak to cry out.

The SOLDIER tended to Sephiroth just beyond his sight. Harry dimly heard him speaking to Rude, but was too tired to pay attention to translating what they said. Sephiroth's eyes flicked open again, for just a second, when Rude and the SOLDIER were out of the way. His eyes met Harry's half-lidded ones. His lips turned up at the corners just a little. He winked and then closed them again. His pupils had been round.

Harry sank into unconsciousness.

~000~

He woke up in a bed between the teenager and Sephiroth. It was a large bed but it was still a bit cramped since Sephiroth wasn't exactly average in the height department and the teenager had sprawled on top of him in his sleep. Harry couldn't grudge the kid for using him as a pillow. The mattress felt as firm as the wood frame it was set in.

Rude was sitting on a stool by a rustic-style fireplace. There was a fire, and he fed it little pieces of kindling to keep it going. The SOLDIER was missing, but Harry could hear the sounds of a shower in the distance.

Someone touched his hand, the one not trapped under Cloud's snuggling body. He held his breath and turned his head. Sephiroth was waking up now and his eyes were still healthy. He slowly and silently raised the hand Harry had de-fingered and showed him that the missing fingers had been replaced. He mouthed, "Ouch."

Harry winced and mouthed, "Sorry."

Sephiroth flicked his ceilings to the ceiling and smiled a secret little smile. He looked at Harry again after a moment and pointed at Cloud with a smirk. Harry rolled his eyes.

Rude came away from the fire to check up on them and Harry made no move to hide that he was awake. Rude quietly asked him if he was in any pain. Harry shook his head, careful not to startle the blonde. Rude nodded and turned to Sephiroth with raised eyebrows. Sephiroth pointed at his neck.

Rude cast and the green glow surrounded Sephiroth's neck before sinking into the skin. Sephiroth let out a sigh and sank deeper into the bed after the spell was finished. Tiny tension lines Harry only noticed now that they were gone had disappeared. Rude nodded to the two of them and said he was going out for maybe half an hour to get something to eat. He said Lieutenant Fair, presumably the SOLDIER from before, was using the lavatory and would be joining them presently.

The door clicked behind him. Sephiroth turned back to Harry.

"We're going to have to explain this to the new President. The reactor is gone, and Hojo will make trouble about his lost specimens."

Harry shook his head, "No he won't. He's dead. I had a little, uh, accident in the labs and killed him."

Sephiroth actually sat up and stared at him with a look of such blatant admiration that Harry blushed and looked away. Long fingers on his chin made him look back. Sephiroth smiled at him. This smile was even lovelier than the one he'd given that night on the destroyed roof of the Shinra building. He leaned down and put his lips to Harry's temple somewhat roughly.

"Thank you," he said hoarsely, showing more emotion than Harry had seen him display before. He just bit his lip and nodded.

"We still need to explain the reactor. I see Rude is here; were there other Turks that you _accidentally _killed? They are considered company assets and you might need to pay for them," the sarcastic inflection he used on the word 'accidentally' made the teenager stir and snuffle in his sleep.

"Yeah, a couple; I didn't kill them, though. Rude did. He said something about witnesses. You know. After the Hojo thing," Harry waved his hand vaguely.

"Ah."

Sephiroth was thinking now, or at least he appeared to be. He frowned every now and then. His hand absently settled on Harry's head to play with his hair. Harry smiled and unwillingly drifted back into sleep. Just as he was falling into the dark blue clouds of slumber, Sephiroth said in a strange, soft voice,

"Thank you for saving me, by the way. And not just on the bridge. If you hadn't come when you did…I don't know what she would have had me do."

Harry blinked at him sleepily and squeezed his fingers, "Any time."

He woke sometime during the night and rolled carefully out of bed, feeling restless. The teenager was gone. Rude was awake by the fire again, but there was no sign of Lieutenant Fair. At his questioning look Rude explained that they were able to get the room next to them and that Fair and the recruit were sleeping over there. Harry wondered why he hadn't been moved over as a less-important person. Surely the lieutenant would have preferred to be in the same quarters as his commander?

As though he had spoken aloud, Rude said with a completely straight face, "The General was spooning you earlier, so we couldn't move you."

Harry hoped it was dark enough behind Rude's sunglasses that he couldn't see him blush like a little girl. He fumbled through his words, getting out that he was going to take a short walk. Rude said that the neighborhood was very safe but gave him a piece of Materia anyway, just in case he came across a monster. As a final touch, the Turk removed his suit jacket and put it around Harry's shoulders. Harry still wore the white scrubs from the labs.

It was cold outside and Harry wished the scrubs were made from thicker fabric. He watched his step, still barefoot. It wouldn't do to get a giant splinter. He craned his neck and looked up a sky that much clearer than the one that hung heavily over Midgar. Here the stars seemed to crowd the sky enthusiastically, and he made up constellations as he walked.

After a little while of walking around the sleeping town, he became aware that someone was following him and making no move to hide it. He sighed and got ready to use his Materia. Before he could, Sephiroth's voice quietly said, "It's just me."

"Oh," he put the sphere back into the pocket of Rude's jacket and turned to smile up at the General. The stars gave him plenty of light to see by, making Sephiroth's affectionate look just as powerful as it would have been back at the town hotel. He looked away. Sephiroth probably didn't mean anything by it and Harry didn't want to lead himself on.

"Aren't you cold?"

Harry tried to deny it but a gust of wind made him shudder. Sephiroth pulled off his heavy uniform coat and draped it over Harry. Harry thanked him shyly, like they were strangers, and let Sephiroth put his arm around his shoulders as they strolled.

"It's nice here. I like it," Harry said, breathing in the scent of pine and fresh air.

"Me too."

Sephiroth snorted suddenly. Harry looked up at him curiously.

"What?"

"I…nothing; it's just this. I never thought I would experience something like what happened yesterday, much less live through it."

"Yeah. The world is suddener and crazier than we like to think," Harry looked back up at the stars and thought of Jenova sailing through them like a barge of death. He was happy she was gone now. She couldn't destroy anything or anyone else now. Sephiroth was safe from her.

Standing there alone in the starlight with the man he was fascinated by, Harry wanted to say something about how he felt, to put into words the heady feeling he got whenever Sephiroth darted his green eyes at him. He wanted to say how much he liked him even though he barely knew him, didn't even know his birthday, address, or favorite color. But the words were stopped up inside him and he couldn't think of any words to say the things he wanted to.

They walked back in silence, crawling into bed with some awkwardness. At least Rude wasn't there to stoically make fun of them behind those dark lenses of his.

Sephiroth lay closer to him than the size of the bed called for but Harry didn't comment on it. He just let his head drop onto the general's shoulder as if by accident. He felt Sephiroth brush his cheek with his fingertips. Sephiroth still smelt of orange zest. Harry cursed himself for his mute affection. Why couldn't he just say it, whatever it was?

When he woke up again, he was in the helicopter beside Sephiroth. Across from them were Lieutenant Fair and the teenager, who was awake now. He had the biggest, brightest blue eyes Harry had ever seen. He realized he was staring after a few moments and hurriedly looked away out the window. While looking at the scenery he became aware that Sephiroth had a hand on his knee, which was unexpected as he didn't think Sephiroth was the touching kind of guy. The Lieutenant and Sephiroth brain-stormed out loud how they were going to explain what happened at the reactor without actually explaining anything, and Sephiroth took notes of their better ideas to be voted on later.

The teenager looked at Harry and Harry looked at the teenager.

Harry smiled. The boy nervously smiled back. Harry mouthed, 'what's your name?'

'Cloud'

Harry smiled again, winked to show that he was friendly, and looked back out the window.

They touched down just a few hours later. They'd spent the trip discussing the cover story and drilling it into their minds in case something happened and they were interrogated. Cloud struggled to remember all the details, but he showed a stubborn streak that helped him accomplish the goal. Rude had some difficulty communicating with them at first because he was in the co-pilot seat and had to relay the story to their pilot, but they managed.

The story was, first, that Hojo was experimenting on a monster that killed him and all of the Turks escorting him except Rude, who managed to kill the beast after the other Turks weakened it considerably. Second, the reactor blew up due to unforeseen technical abnormalities caused by monsters getting into the wiring. This also accounted for the loss of Professor Hojo's stored specimens being destroyed. Third, Harry had escaped from the labs prior to the monster that destroyed Hojo and the Turks. He was intending to destroy the reactor but arrived when it was already in flames and saved the General's life out of altruistic motives. This act of heroism was calculated to remove lingering suspicion about Harry's status as Suspicious Foreigner.

Rufus bought the story, more distracted by establishing a new cabinet than what his General had spent the weekend doing with some weird foreign person.

He was about to dismiss them when Fain broke through the glass of his window, gun raised. She fired two shots into Rufus' stomach and chest before Sephiroth could behead her. Her head landed at Cloud's feet with a wet 'thump'. The teenager promptly vomited into the trash can.

Harry rushed to the President's side on instinct, Materia in hand, and cast Cure. The green glow fairly exploded into the room, suffusing everything with enough healing energy to leave everyone tingling and feeling a little 'happy'. The wounds and accompanying blood stains on the President's impeccable three-piece white suit vanished.

He stared at Harry with something like wonder.

Harry had forgotten about the terrorists. He rattled off the address to their headquarters to Sephiroth, who dragged Zack off with him to attend to the problem. Harry was left alone with the President, Cloud, and the President's secretary. Rude had vanished like a shadow, presumably on Turk business.

Not knowing what else to do, he ordered the secretary to get someone to come and clean up Fain's body and the broken glass.

The President seemed shaken but grateful. He settled warily into his chair and Harry left his side to see how Cloud was faring. The President called him back.

"Look, you've saved my life. What can I do to thank you?"

"You can stop using Mako," Harry responded bluntly. The President looked taken aback.

"And what shall I use to power the world instead? There are a lot of people depending on Mako not only for their food and shelter but for their jobs as well."

Harry shrugged, "There's solar and wind power, or you could just go back to your roots and use plain old electricity. Anything but Mako. But if you think it's impossible for you to change from Mako, fine. I'll get somebody else to fix this problem. You _are _new to this leadership thing anyhow."

The flippancy with which he said this was designed to inflame the President's ego. From the dilation of his pupils, the mark hit home. The young President straightened in his chair, something like challenge in his eyes. "We'll see if a new leader can't do something after all."

Harry kept his casual façade, "Am I dismissed? I'd like to get Strife out of here."

"You're dismissed."

Rufus Shinra watched him go, his eyes narrowed with thought. He knew that he'd been manipulated, but what Potter didn't know was that he was already planning to switch away from Mako and had actually begun setting the groundwork for this five years ago behind his father's back. The energy revolution would happen within the next three days, possibly sooner.

~000~

Harry made sure Cloud was in the capable hands of Fanny, who practically cooed at the sight of Cloud, before heading for the Lower Plate. He knew Sephiroth and Fair would be wreaking havoc in one of the Sectors, but he wasn't heading their way. They didn't need his help. No, he was going to see Aerith.

Just in case the President was lying to his face like any normal jackal-headed politician, he was going to make some changes himself.

The church was still as out of place as he remembered, a place of peace and beauty in a veritable hellhole of human debris and their corresponding trash. The scent of the lilies permeated the air around the building. He stopped at the foot of the steps, eyes closed, to smell them before he knocked on the doors.

Aerith called for him to enter.

Stepping inside, he smiled at the sight of her. She was crouched in the center of the flowers, trowel in hand, weeding. Looking up, she waved when she saw him.

"Hi, Harry! You're right on time."

He raised his eyebrows but didn't question her. From the angle of the light coming through the roof, it was approaching evening. Soon the Lower Plate would be lit up with the Planet's lifeblood like a circus.

He was about to explain himself when she crossed the flowers. She laid her hand in his and the voice of the Planet came out of her mouth.

"_I am so very grateful to you for defeating the enemy. Though you are not my child and far from home, you have treated me as though I were your own mother."_

Harry smiled and squeezed Aerith's hand, "It was a pleasure, believe me."

"_You have an idea."_

"Yes. I think you should withdraw yourself from the Mako so that it ceases to function as a power source. They will have no choice but to adapt."

"_That is harsher and more difficult than I would like, but there is merit in the idea. I need all of my energy just to prepare for springtime…perhaps I shall do as you propose."_

"I'm not telling you what to do. It's just a suggestion," Harry smiled at Aerith and the Planet smiled back.

"_I understand. Here is my answer."_

As they spoke the glow of the Mako-powered lights that lit up the Lower Plate had turned on, signaling the beginning of night-time. He watched with Aerith, alone in her body now that the Planet had withdrawn, as every light turned out.

The ceaseless hum of the Plate stopped, leaving blank silence in its wake.

Harry smiled.

~000~

End Ignited

There will be an epilogue


	9. Chapter 9

Epilogue

Harry surveyed the New Midgar from the top of the Shinra building. As a monument to his father, who most people knew Rufus had despised, the roof had been converted into a giant viewing gallery for the public. There was a larger-than-life statue of the late President in the very center of the floor, modeled on a younger and slimmer version of the man Harry had glimpsed in a helicopter. The ceiling and walls were made from broad panes of glass stretched across a thin iron cage.

It was dawn now, and the bright sunshine burst over the desert, carpeted with a thin layer of greenery already, to bathe the city in light. Since the removal of Mako as a power source, the Plate had been disassembled and the walls removed. The city looked naked and gutted and filthy for several months while the construction continued, and then the soaring apartment buildings had sprung up around the Shinra tower to house those who used to live above the Plate. The slums below had been cleaned up and the dilapidated buildings restored by teams of volunteers. The city was bright and clean now, and their economy had been boosted by an impossible influx of tourists.

There had been mass pandemonium after Harry advised the Planet to withdraw itself from the above-ground Mako, but Rufus' plans had kicked in a week later and the chaos ceased as quickly as it started. Harry never confessed to his hand in the 'mysterious power failure', but he knew Sephiroth suspected he was involved. Harry smiled. Keeping secrets from Sephiroth was like trying to dry water: some things can't be done.

Sephiroth had proved invaluable to the new President when it came to reforming the city. His ideas and foresight had made the city what it was today. The fact that he led the movement of social responsibility that inspired so many people to volunteer to help rebuild the city itself was a testament to his dedication. He was promoted from General to Vice President within a month of the reform movement, though he still found his way into the Military Base most days.

During the rebuilding Harry had spent a lot of time with Sephiroth. He had offered to house Harry in his rooms but Harry declined. He'd told himself that until he found a way to tell Sephiroth how he felt he had no business living in such close proximity to him. The temptation would inevitably prove too much for him and he knew that he would do something stupid and ruin any chance he had of having anything lasting with Sephiroth.

He ended up living in the old priest's quarters attached to Aerith's church. She was amused to hear that he didn't want to live in her attack on fear of Zack strangling him and offered to help him fix up the dusty old rooms. There was a small central room, a sink, and a bathroom. He set up a table in the center with a pair of chairs ("office"), a cabinet beside the sink ("kitchen"), and a sofa ("bedroom") against the wall. It was tiny but it suited his needs. He was hardly home except for nights anyway; most of his time was spent building the city and brainstorming with Sephiroth on everything from the plumbing problem to their air purification options. Harry borrowed inventions and ideas from Earth, things that had never occurred to the people on this planet, and repeatedly impressed the ex-General. Most of the ideas he shared were his own, though, so he didn't feel guilty for the recognition his contributions got him. He was offered as official place on the Shinra Board but declined. The other members reminded him of jackals and he didn't want anything to do with them. He claimed that he preferred to be thought of as a sort of independent consultant.

Now that the city was rebuilt he didn't have an excuse to spend most of his day with Sephiroth. He had spent the last week gardening with Aerith but found himself unable to stay away from Sephiroth.

He was on the roof trying to think of a way to see Sephiroth every day. He didn't want to spend too much time apart that the ex-General would forget him. He didn't know if he could stand it if Sephiroth was no longer part of his life.

He wished he could talk to Hermione. She would know what to do. Hell, she'd probably know how he could talk about his feelings with Sephiroth. But he knew that there was no way he would ever make it back to Earth again. The spell Luna had cast on him stopped whatever it was that let him rocket across the universe into this parallel existence. He'd tried experimenting with every kind of Materia he could get his hands on to no result.

Sephiroth appeared beside him. Harry jumped, heard him chuckle, and punched him in the arm. Sephiroth never tired of creeping up on him.

They stood together watching the sun creep higher in the sky, light refracting in a brilliant display from the shiny new chrome and glass buildings. It was a breathtaking, transparent morning.

"What are you doing up here all alone?" Sephiroth asked at last, turning from the view to look at Harry. Harry shrugged a shoulder.

"I was enjoying the view. It's easier to see it now than when this place is crowded with tourists."

"Hm," Sephiroth grunted and reached out a hand to touch Harry's cheek, "you're pale. Have you not been sleeping well lately?"

"No, I've been fine. Same as usual," Harry shrugged, trying to look casual. It'd grown impossible for him to sleep this past week without daily doses of Sephiroth's company, platonic though it was. He had no intention of admitting that, though. He'd look like a sentimental fool.

Sephiroth smirked. He put his arm around Harry's neck and gently, very gently, he bit his ear. Harry stood stock still, stunned into a statue. He heard Sephiroth whisper, "You're lying. Why? Does it have something to do with…me?"

Harry closed his eyes. He should have known that there was no way Sephiroth didn't know. Of course he knew. He probably knew exactly how Harry felt, and could even put into words that funny fluttery feeling he got whenever Sephiroth so much as breathed in his direction. He'd been playing with him, just waiting for him to say something stupid like how much he loved the way he said his name or flexed his fingers when they were sore from typing.

"Sorry."

It took him a moment to realize that he had been the one to say it. He made to step away but Sephiroth stopped him by laying his other hand on the small of his back. Harry stared at his chest, mind uncomprehending. Why was Sephiroth standing so close to him? He knew that the ex-General didn't have the best idea of how to use physical affection as he was still new to it, but this was different somehow.

"Why?"

"I-" Harry didn't know what to say. So he didn't say anything at all. In a burst of bravery he tilted up his head and kissed the underside of Sephiroth's chin. Sephiroth smiled and bent his head, the arm around Harry's neck slipping down to join its twin around his hips, and touched his nose to his. Harry smiled back.

And then he went and said, "I love you."

Sephiroth, instead of rejecting or misunderstanding him, said, "I know. I was wondering when you were going to tell me."

"Oh."

Well, he felt stupid.

~000~

They kept their relationship private. Neither of them wanted the publicity that the news of Sephiroth dating _anyone _would bring, much less a man. Not one to ever enjoy flaunting his happiness in front of others, Harry told Aerith and left it at that. They didn't make eyes at each other in public, though they did exclusively sit beside each other when Harry was invited to a meeting with the Board.

In private things moved slowly. Harry had never had a relationship that he would call healthy and Sephiroth had never had a relationship at all, so they stepped carefully and kept their hands to themselves. It was more than a month before they exchanged anything more than a kiss.

When they slept together for the first time, it was almost an accident.

They'd been up late working on a project that would revolutionize the way they imported food into the city, and because they didn't want anyone to know about it just yet they held their meeting in Harry's priest quarters, sitting at the table that dominated his flat. It was eight feet long and five feet wide, the perfect surface for spreading out their materials.

Unconsciously, Harry, while talking, had placed his foot on one of the bars of the chair upon which Sephiroth was sitting. As they talked, their chairs were moved closer to one another. And then, as Harry was drawing a diagram to explain something, leaning forward with his lower lip between his teeth, Sephiroth leaned in and kissed his bare neck. Harry kept drawing but he reached back with his free hand and yanked on his hair to retaliate.

"Don't distract me."

"Why not? _You're_ distracting _me_."

Harry snorted, "How?"

Instead of answering right away Sephiroth pulled him out of his chair and onto his lap, putting his chin on his shoulder. Harry could feel him smiling against his cheek.

"You look very nice tonight. Is that for me?"

Harry flushed at getting caught putting some extra grooming into his routine, a routine that normally consisted of rolling out of bed and putting on whatever smelled cleanest while still half-asleep. Out loud he huffed, "Would you rather I looked sloppy as usual?"

"I like you sloppy, but I like you like this too."

Harry rolled his eyes, smiling. He tried to go back to his diagram but Sephiroth shifted position in the chair and Harry felt something suspiciously like arousal pressing into his lower back. A flush began to spread down his chest beneath his shirt as his body temperature spiked. He tried not to show that he'd noticed, but the mouth on his neck proved that once again he was completely transparent.

"Um…"

"I won't distract you. You just go on explaining and I promise to behave."

Sephiroth, despite his words, was not behaving. Broad palms moved to Harry's thighs and maneuvered them so that his legs splayed on either side of the chair. Harry felt excited at this unexpected move and his body betrayed every spare bit of electricity in his veins. After spreading his legs, the hands began to slide up the inseams of his trousers thumbs first. Harry stopped breathing.

The hands stopped just short of his crotch and Sephiroth asked, "Why are you so quiet? I thought you were going to explain your diagram."

Harry inhaled deeply through his nose and let it out slowly through his mouth. He felt marginally calmer. Some blood returned from his groin to his brain. He began to fumble his way through an explanation of why the delivery companies would support being replaced by a bullet train if they were appropriately compensated and recommended to the developing city of Sappho (named by Harry without anyone else being aware of the connotations associated with it).

A finger tracing over his zipper made him stutter to a stop. Sephiroth stopped when he did and made an inquiring sound. Harry cleared his throat and continued only to stop seconds later when his zipper was drawn down (button long flicked open) and a hand slithered inside. Sephiroth made no coy comments this time. Harry dimly heard him panting over the sound of roaring in his ears.

He stroked and squeezed and his mouth began to suck on Harry's neck with a fervor he'd never exhibited before. Harry moaned and squirmed restlessly on his lap, his body knowing what it wanted and frustrated that it wasn't getting it. Without warning he was bodily lifted up and flipped over onto his back on the table. Sephiroth loomed over him, his hair a solid curtain to one side of his long neck. His eyes were black with a thin strip of electric green around them.

Harry couldn't seem to get enough air in his lungs. Sephiroth kissed his lips, his neck, and his chest with abandon. His eyes were half-closed but whenever they chanced to meet Harry's they glowed. In a dizzying movement he pulled Harry into a seated position to remove his shirt in one smooth upward jerk. Then Harry was on his back again and lips were exploring his hipbones, the places where his ribs still jutted out even after all these years; he kissed his navel. Harry laughed breathlessly from the ticklish sensation.

Not wanting to be a passive participant in what was turning into their most passionate encounter yet, he tugged on the silver hair until Sephiroth moved away from his chest and back to his face. Harry kissed him with parted lips, letting his lips enclose first the upper than the lower half of Sephiroth's mouth. Scrambling further towards the center of the table, he drew Sephiroth with him until Sephiroth's longer body was between his bent knees. He flicked his tongue against Sephiroth's until he felt the hands wandering across his bent knees trembling.

Sephiroth pulled away from his lips to remove his sweater, tossing it over his shoulder in a theatrical gesture that made Harry snort.

He smirked and then swooped down straight for the front of Harry's trousers. Harry gasped when he felt teeth nipping with care at the most sensitive part of his body. He bit his hand and rested the other gently on the crown of Sephiroth's head. His trousers were pulled down to his thighs.

To his disappointment, Sephiroth only kissed the shaft before getting off the table to remove his trousers completely. Harry became acutely aware of how exposed he was when Sephiroth didn't get back on the table with him. He propped himself up on his elbows and touched Sephiroth with his foot.

"Are you okay?"

He snapped out whatever had frozen him in place and nodded. He picked up Harry like he was a sleepy child and laid him on the sofa. Harry watched him shuck off his work trousers and peel off the maroon socks he bought him as a joke. Sephiroth smiled when he saw Harry looking at the socks.

"I like them, even if they are supposed to be some kind of joke."

He lay down on top of him, frowned, and squirmed until Harry was resting on his chest. He ran his palms down his back, stopped to squeeze his backside, and back up to his shoulders. Harry sighed and dropped a kiss on his collarbone. This was the first time they'd both been completely naked together, and Harry realized how similar and different it felt to lie against a male naked body versus a female one.

"Do you have any…?" Sephiroth raised his eyebrows and Harry knew what he meant. He nodded and reached into the drawer of the cabinet he kept his clothes in. Sephiroth took the bottle from him and frowned at the label. "Is this the cheap kind?"

Harry groaned and thumped his forehead against Sephiroth's clavicle, "Does it matter? It was bought for me, not for us." Did Sephiroth have to choose _now _to be a snob? Sephiroth's surprising flashes of snobbiness normally amused the hell out of him but he really didn't want anything to stand in the way of the mood right now. He'd wanted Sephiroth for a long time and if this didn't go through, who knew when they would get to this point again? Sephiroth wasn't like other men in their twenties. Somehow he managed to think straight where others were blinded by their hormones.

He should have been the one living in priest's quarters, not Harry.

A slick hand stroking down his spine and between his cheeks startled him into the present. Sephiroth snickered and began to massage the sensitive skin just beyond his perineum. Harry shuddered and shook on his chest, fingers spastically gripping and releasing his hair. He jerked up almost onto his knees when a finger slipped inside and crooked to flirt with his prostate.

"Oh…!"

Since when did Sephiroth know how to do that? He felt another finger slide in, and then another. They scissored and jabbed until he was a whimpering mess. His only comfort was the fluid he could feel leaking out of Sephiroth. It was the only sign that he was feeling as aroused as Harry was, though Harry was past the point of arousal now. He was teetering on the cliffs of ecstasy, held back by the single functioning brain cell he had left that told him that there were better things to come.

And come they did. Sephiroth deemed him stretched enough and tugged on him. Harry awoke as though from a daze and found himself straddling him. Sephiroth smiled up at him, looking flushed and breathless. "Ready?"

Harry could only nod, lips somehow chapped and swollen all at once when he licked them.

Sephiroth took hold of his hipbone with one hand and put the other beneath Harry, presumably around his erection. He guided Harry down onto it. Harry breathed deep and slow, eyes slipping shut. With one sense gone the others amplified. Sephiroth felt huge and impossible as he popped through the first ring of muscle. He also felt wonderful. There was something about the knowledge that he was inside Harry that made him pleasantly shivery at the thought. He slid in further. Harry thought that perhaps that was the end of it, but then he slid in further still, and then some more. Harry yelped, eyes flying open.

He was beginning to feel stretched. It kind of hurt too, now that he was paying more attention. He deepened his breaths and locked eyes with Sephiroth. The look of tortured control on his face made the stretched feeling less painful. He felt his lips twitch up.

Finally he slid all the way down onto Sephiroth's hips. He felt his long legs bent up behind him in support, like the back of a chair. He leaned back and exhaled slowly, clenching his insides to let out the last of the breath. Sephiroth groaned and grabbed his hips so hard Harry jumped.

"Don't…I can't…"

Harry nodded and swiped a hand through his hair, trying to get it out of his eyes. He tentatively moved up a fraction of an inch and then down again. Sephiroth hummed and loosened his stranglehold on Harry's hips. They came to rest on Harry's tensed thighs. Harry moved again, more this time. Sephiroth jerked his hips in time with his shallow thrusts, giving Harry confidence to move bolder. It was starting to feel good, the sliding sensation of flesh inside him. He reached back and put his palms on Sephiroth's knees for leverage, pushing his chest forward.

Having a better idea of what he was doing, he started a shy rhythm. For about 30 seconds all was well, and then the angle changed and Sephiroth hit his prostate. Harry shouted and had to grab the base of his erection to hold off orgasm. Sephiroth grinned wolfishly at him. Harry had a second to be very, very afraid before the hands moved from where they had been idly worshipping his torso to his hips. He was bodily lifted and slammed down. Stars exploded behind his eyes and he threw back his head.

This was repeated over and over and over again until he was sure something in there was bruised. Or he would have thought that if he still had the ability to do more than make loud and embarrassing noises.

Sephiroth began to sweat profusely, the strain of holding off his orgasm while lifting Harry simultaneously showing itself. In a desperate maneuver for more time, he changed their positions with a flex of his legs that ended with Harry on his back and Sephiroth over him. His fists dug into the arm of the sofa on either side of Harry's head as he used all of his weight to slam as hard as he could with dead accuracy into Harry's prostate.

Harry screamed hoarsely and his nails clawed at his back, his ankles tight around his hips and digging into his lower back. Sephiroth tucked his face into Harry's neck and began to kiss the tense tendons there to distract himself from the increasingly vocal sounds Harry was making. They were in some strange language full of vowels.

He sped up his thrusts and felt him clenching tighter and tighter with an impending orgasm.

He lowered himself onto his elbow arms and spared a hand to stroke Harry's erection. He pushed his thumb against the slit, spreading the generous droplets of pre-come, and felt Harry go tense as a bowstring, his back arched. There was one more loud cry, this one sounding a lot like his name, and then Harry shuddered his release.

The combination of the sight and sensation of Harry made him follow him into euphoria.

When the aftershocks faded away enough for him to think about something other than sex, he noticed that Harry was no longer conscious. He made sure he hadn't broken anything and then carefully got up for a damp cloth to clean up the evidence. He pulled on his underwear and found some pajama trousers for Harry to wear.

That accomplished, he turned out the lights and wrapped himself around Harry. He kissed Harry's forehead and fell asleep.

On the floor, a piece of Materia from Sephiroth's pocket began to glow. With a burst of light it ignited the room and the sofa and its occupants vanished.

~000~

The next morning Harry and Sephiroth woke up in Kings Cross Station to find a crowd of curious Muggles surrounding them, some of them taking pictures with their phones.

~000~

End Epilogue

Thanks for reading and reviewing! I enjoyed writing in this style, which is considerably more fast-paced and action-packed than my usual deal (with the exception of this epilogue). I hope the lemon is enough to shut up the perverts in the peanut gallery. If not, well, what more do you want from me? This baby is done.


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